SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Persona, identity infrastructure for real-time verification and protection, today launched its free Starter plan out of beta, the first permanent free solution in the identity verification industry. This offering will enable any sized business to offer instant identity verification for up to 500 verifications a month at no cost while protecting users’ personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security numbers, bank account numbers, addresses, and more against fraud and identity theft, complying with existing data privacy regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated business' need to digitize their processes. As organizations onboard new digital tools, it is paramount that they build in privacy and security. Persona is helping businesses of all sizes meet this demand with the release of their new Starter plan, which is the only offering of its kind to bring transparency and affordability to the identity verification process with industry-leading data protection, automated fraud detection, and compliance with data privacy regulations. With this offering, Persona is enabling customers to quickly and easily get started with identity verification without a costly contract. Early beta customers like Clever Credit have used the Starter plan offering for a variety of use cases from trust and safety to KYC.
Fraud and identity theft are widespread and costly to consumers, and reputation-damaging for businesses of all sizes: More than $5 trillion is lost to fraud globally each year. A recent study by Iomart estimates that, every time a company’s data is breached, they lose about 7.27% of their overall value. In 2019 alone, 14.4 million consumers - 1 in 15 people - were victims of identity fraud. Furthermore, organizations amassing sensitive PII through the identity verification process must safeguard the data to maintain their customers' trust and comply with new stringent data privacy regulations like CCPA and GDPR.
“At Persona, we believe in supporting our customers at every stage of growth, while also protecting the individuals who are being verified,” said co-founder and CEO Rick Song. “With businesses rapidly increasing their online presence in order to stay competitive, consumer expectations around data privacy and protection at an all time high, and the evolution of data privacy regulations, it’s imperative to create a safer online environment. The Starter plan enables us to do that by ensuring any business can verify an individual while safeguarding their sensitive personal information.”
Persona’s offerings can be adapted to any business or industry need and every individual with the widest range of global verification options in the industry -- including database lookups, quizzes, reverse phone lookups, document verification, government ID verification, and biometric options including uploading a selfie and live video capture. Its machine learning automation technologies analyze verification details, resulting in a frictionless experience, instant verification and safer review by minimizing the number of humans evaluating PII.
“Once we defined our requirements for the Brex Cash onboarding flow, we evaluated a number of different providers,” said Thomas Piani, Director of Product, Brex. “Persona was the right choice for us because of their geographical coverage, focus on user experience, and the team’s willingness to closely partner with us to build the right integrations for our needs.”
The Starter plan is available now, offering 500 free government ID checks a month with multiple interfaces, an end-user flow and data storage. With Persona’s easy-to-use platform, installation and onboarding is completed in less than a day. To learn more about Persona’s free offering, visit withpersona.com.
About Persona
Persona is the leading identity infrastructure for real-time verification and protection, adaptable to any business need and every individual. The platform offers a unified identity solution to help customers not only verify but automate the management of identities and decisions that must be made throughout a customer lifecycle. Persona was founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, and is now available in 190+ countries and in 18 different languages. The company is backed by Coatue and First Round Capital. Persona has a wide range of customers across a variety of industries including Square, Petal, Brex, Hipcamp, Outdoorsy, Postmates, Rently, SimpleHealth and Sonder. For more information, please visit withpersona.com.
