[Keynote at Group Futurista] Unum ID – Unlocking Instant Onboarding with "1-Click or Free" KYC

So Nick is going to be delivering a presentation on unlocking instant onboarding with one-click or free KYC. So Nick, it's all the way over to you.

Fabulous. Thank you for the introduction there, Rob. Very excited to be with everyone here today and to share with you all how UnimyID unlocks instant onboarding with one-click or free KYC. Let me advance the slide here. So Rob already gave me a great background here, but again, I'm Nick Adams, Head of Partnerships at UnumID. I'm a Chicago Booth MBA graduate based in Chicago, Illinois. And if you want to connect with me and learn more after this webinar, feel free to send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn via the QR code shown on the screen here. I'll also be showing this at the end of the presentation as well so you can gather that information then. So I'd like to start out by briefly setting the stage for what we're going to cover here today. First, I want to introduce you to the concept of reusable identity, which is one of the biggest opportunities in technology today and similar to some of the changes that we've seen in technology in the past. Then I'm going to describe the problem of reusable ID and what it solves by taking away the pain of inherent— that's inherent in the current state of KYC onboarding today. Next, I'm going to share with you how UnimID alleviates this pain by unlocking one-click or free KYC through reusable identity. Which is completely revolutionizing the customer onboarding space. And finally, I'll go through why this applies to you and invite you all to get involved in the reusable ID movement today. So what is reusable identity and why is it one of the biggest opportunities in technology today? We see reusable identity as the next clear evidence step going forward for how identity is going to work in the future. Reusable is a seismic shift that will impact not just financial services, but really the entire online identity market across all industries. And it's immediately imminent and unavoidable and something that should be focused on today before it's too late. To give you some background, I want to take you through the evolution of identity over time. As we all know, ID in the pre-internet era was based in traditional physical paper forms such as passports, driver's licenses, Social Security cards. But as society moved online, we created the ability to log into websites. We decided to use usernames and passwords as our main forms of identifying ourselves, as this was simply the easiest and the quickest way to do it. But usernames and passwords are prone to loss, fraud, and ultimately have the limitation of still not truly knowing who is on that other side of the screen. These issues led to the introduction of eKYC and many other tools that enable true know your customer practices to be performed online. And this has been revolutionary for many, many sectors, you know, neobanking and credit lending, as it's enabled the ability to accurately identify a specific human being online with confidence. However, it's still a, a massive problem remains, and that is not truly portable across organizations. Users need to repeat this process numerous times at every merchant they interact with, creating a high user friction point. Industry leaders know that enabling reusable portable identity with all the assurances of eKYC but none of the hassle is the next big thing for the evolution of identity. This is absolutely game-changing, and we're happy to sit on the bleeding edge of that frontier. And that frontier is here today. Don't just take my word for it. McKenzie believes this technology will unlock up to 13% of global GDP by 2030, which is in the order of magnitude of trillions of dollars. Studies by Liminal, which was previously One World Identity, confirmed that the revenue of the reusable ID market is already over $30 billion and will reach a quarter trillion dollars in the next 5 years. And we've already seen governments start to get involved too. For example, the Indian government issued a unique digital ID to all of its citizens that's secured with biometrics and reusable across their entire set of government systems. However, we haven't really seen this take off yet in the free open market. and it's only a matter of time until we do. Again, this is a huge shift worth trillions of dollars, and everyone in the industry recognizes that it's coming sooner rather than later. And we've seen reusable make a similar scale of impact before, back in the credit market in the 1950s. So back then, Americans had dozens of lines of credit independently with each retailer. So for example, a Sears charge card could only be used to enable credit at Sears. And didn't apply anywhere else, making credit access very cumbersome for merchants and credit issuers and end users. But then in 1958, Bank of America introduced the BankAmericard, which became the first general-purpose digital or credit card. And this unlocked seamless credit across organizations and eventually blossomed into Visa that we know today. With a unified card network, you can now instantly access credit everywhere. Which completely changed the scalability of credit cards for banks and enabled them to become one of the most profitable aspects of retail banking. Needless to say, this innovation into reusable was transformational for the entire space, and Visa still dominates the credit market today with a market cap over $400 billion. And now reusable is changing identity. We're at that same inflection point for identity today as we were with credit back in the 1950s. Right now, identity data is collected and stored independently at hundreds of different organizations, making it tough to seamlessly and securely store, access, and share verified identity data. The single-use nature of identity burdens the end users and ultimately impacts the bottom line for organizations seeking access to verified identities. The identity space is crying out for this Bank of America card for identity to create a single source of truth that unlocks access anywhere. And that's what we've built here with UnimID, a single source of truth that unlocks access everywhere. To understand the impact of reusable ID, I want to take a moment to go through something that you're probably already familiar with, and that's the state of today's existing KYC onboarding processes, which, as you all know, is slow, redundant, and costly. Let's take a moment to step back and look at how many steps are involved with KYC today. Even the best-in-class fintech platforms like Robinhood, Acorns, and Earnin struggled to streamline the KYC signup process with dozens of clicks and input fields. And while financial institutions are required to collect lots of personal data such as name and email address and Social Security number, they need to collect all these for KYC compliance. This is clearly a painful process, and without reusable identity, What you see on the screen here is unfortunately the best that these financial services can really do. So on average, the signup process takes 29 clicks, 16 form fields, and 6 minutes to complete. For many users, it takes 12 hours to get fully approved and has to go through a manual review process. And unsurprisingly, more than 1 in 4 users don't even complete this process because it takes so long. Uh, I was personally talking to a credit issuing company earlier this week, that had a 40% abandonment rate. And another one of our customers, a crypto exchange, has a whopping 70% abandonment rate. It's just crazy, right? I mean, that means that out of every 10 people that try to sign up for their site, only 3 actually do because that process takes such a long time. So this really crushes their scalability as a company as a whole. And that crypto exchange isn't alone, right? The consequences of the current flow are persistent for everyone. It disrupts the customer experience. It's slow, it's frustrating, and perhaps worst of all, it's redundant as the customer's already entered all this information in multiple times at other services, probably really recently. And so why do they need to go through this entire process again? I'm guessing many of you on, on this webinar today probably fill out a form to sign up for this event, and you understand the monotony of inputting the same information over and over again. Not only is this a terrible user experience, but it's also expensive for the companies too. So KYC costs between $1.50 and $3 for each of their millions of users. So those costs really add up, and ultimately they don't really increase the value of the customer as it's only a sunk cost of doing business. Today, simply put, KYC is just a necessary evil and remains one of the biggest user experience challenges in every fintech product. But at UnumID, we know that there's a better way. We've created the next generation of identity by unlocking instant onboarding with our one-click or free KYC. Our frictionless KYC signup functionality can be completed in under 10 seconds, eliminating user friction with an instant onboarding experience. That means no typing in forms, no taking a picture of your driver's license, no selfies, but all of the KYC data that you, that these fintechs need. Our one-click process is so easy that fewer than 5% of users don't complete it, and at scale, we believe this number will drop to less than 1%, which would make the pain of laborious form entry a thing of the past. We make one-click KYC possible through our digital ID card network. First, we work with issuers like KYC vendors, banking-as-a-service providers, and banks themselves. To generate a verified user digital ID card that's bound to the end user's biometrics and stored cryptographically on their mobile device. Next, the user who is now empowered with that digital ID card can onboard instantly using Continue with One Click at any of our fintech relying parties, such as investment platforms, lending institutions, or crypto exchanges. This is a similar experience to sign up with Facebook or Continue with Google functionality, but with verified KYC user data, which is very key. Finally, when the relying party receives that data via the one-click signup, they pay the card issuer for immediate access to that verified data. So issuers can continue to receive passive income over time on every ID card reuse. Users can onboard with a single click to relying parties, and relying parties can enjoy dramatically higher user conversion rates. Now let's take a look at what that means in practice. So the first time that we see a user signing up for a fintech in our network, they go through the standard KYC onboarding process exactly the same as it is today. There's no difference, the same IDV vendor, same data used to sign up. And then once that data is confirmed and the user is verified, we generate a new digital Unum ID card and bind that verified data to that specific user and their device. You'll notice that the ID card here is company branded, just like how a credit card is designed with the branding of the issuing bank, so that your brand is going to stay top of wallet and top of mind during every ID card reuse from there on out. And now the user with that new digital ID card can onboard everywhere else in our ecosystem with just a single click. Now let's double-click here into the, the continue with one-click process. Our ID card enables users to share dozens of data points with a single click by sitting on top of the existing onboarding processes already in place today and custom branded by the fintech to match their style and desired functionality. So the signup works in these 3 easy steps. First, we dynamically detect if a user has an ID card with that required information used during the signup flow. And then next, if they do, if that information is found on the user's device in the ID card, we display the verified user data and present that card to them where their user can review that data and then consent to share that data the same as they would if they were typing in the same personal information into the fintech company site during the standard onboarding process. So that means if a user has verified personal email and a verified work email, but they only want to share that verified personal email and not their work email, they can select that in the dropdown option at this point. And then the last step here is that the user completes the onboarding process by clicking share data and performing a quick biometric check with either Face ID or Touch ID to confirm that they are in fact the person that they say they are as they're logging on. And then that data is shared and a new account is created in less than 10 seconds. So this is more than a 10x improvement on the existing KYC process. So importantly, we as a network provider, we never touch or see any personal information whatsoever. Every user owns all of their own data. They consent to every transaction and they only share the data that's required for each use case. So as UnumID, we guarantee first the legitimacy of the source of that data. Secondly, that it hasn't been tampered with or altered in any way. And third, that it's in fact the correct user and the correct device providing that data. We do this through advanced cryptography and biometrics, but don't worry, I'll save those details for the, the Web3 conference. We've just launched what's proven to be an incredibly successful new campaign for our product, which is this one-click or free KYC. So I've already talked about one-click signup and the dramatic improvement in user conversion that it produces. And as I'm sure you've noticed, we can only enable this experience for users that are in our network. And while that network is growing fast, we want to provide value to fintechs even when the user doesn't have an Unim ID card yet. So when a user goes to sign up at a fintech, we can dynamically detect whether they do or do not have an ID card with the required data. If they do, we send them through that continue with one-click process I just described— less than 10 seconds, instant access, really high conversion rate. And then if they don't, the user goes through the existing KYC process that's already required by the fintech today. So they can use any vendor that they want. Any processes that they choose, and we can simply sit on top of that process. And then at the end of that process, with full user consent, we can simply call our API and issue a new Unum ID card for that user. And when we do, we fully subsidize the cost of identity verification for that user. So again, for the fintech, this is completely free. We make their existing KYC process completely free. So no matter what, whether they have an ID card or not, the fintech wins. In the case where they don't have an ID card, we completely eliminate that KYC cost. In the case where they do have an ID card, we have dramatically higher user conversion. If there's only one slide to take away from this entire presentation, it's this one here. So I just want to emphasize that this is really the most important point that we're trying to make today. And so we've talked about reusable identity. It's a booming opportunity in digital technology. And it unlocks access for fintechs in a dramatic way. But how does this apply to you and why does it matter now? So for fintechs that we're speaking with, the value of reusable is becoming increasingly evident. Very simply, reusable identity helps you cut costs and streamline onboarding. As I'm sure is obvious, our solution creates a wide range of benefits and opportunities. So first, the onboarding more users with a much lower friction for the user experience. That is then secondly going to increase revenue through user growth as more users are able to join your platform. Third, we reduce your KYC costs for onboarding, especially in the near term as we're fully subsidizing those costs and providing KYC for free. Fourth, it allows you to earn net new passive revenue streams every time the ID card is reused. And then fifth, we're growing the lifetime value for your customers by making your ID card and your brand integral to their digital life. If they use that ID card to sign up at various locations, it's going to be really tough for them to then quit that ID card, and it makes your brand much stickier for the end user. And for potential ID card issuers, so such as banks, banking-as-a-service vendors, KYC providers, or really anyone else that verifies lots of user data, You can also see enormous benefits by becoming an issuer in our network. In short, companies choose to become an issuer to earn passive net new revenue and activate exponential growth. We help transition your revenue model from active to passive income by enabling you as issuer to only have to perform a KYC check once for an end user, and then you can just sit back and relax and enjoy those downstream revenue effects every single time that user reuses their ID card that you issued to them. You no longer have to perform active sales to every business in order to support your KYC functions, and that allows you to grow your business exponentially by allowing the natural, natural network effects to take place. For KYC vendors, we unlock a new deal flow by enabling you to sell your existing solution for free with our fully subsidized KYC pricing. Which gives you a huge advantage over your competition, as I'm sure is obvious to you. As our network continues to grow and you gain a large verified customer base, this will then become a future value proposition for your business, as you can boast a, our high conversion and one-click capabilities for a large percentage of the customers coming to your customer's website, making you more attractive as a KYC vendor. And then finally, our reshareability of KYC. Enables you to activate your goldmine of already existing, already in-house user data and prepare your business for the unavoidable shift into reusable ID with better unit economics than you already have today. And we're already partnering with some great organizations. So we recently completed a partnership with Hyperverge, which is one of the biggest eKYC vendors in India. They've done over 650 million ID and document verifications for end users. Uh, our tech is live with Draper Associates, who's one of our key investors, where it's been implemented in their company email inboxes to help weed out bots and spammers. We've had really great feedback from Tim Draper himself as we've helped him streamline his email inbox and save tons of time by only focusing on the most important emails and avoiding all the other things that come into his inbox. Um, and lastly, we're working with a large number of fintechs and DeFi crypto credit decisioning, neobanking, financial services, and they're all currently on our waitlist and eagerly awaiting our full-scale deployment of our network. I also want to take a moment to highlight our incredible leadership team as well. So our founders are two brothers, Aidan and Liam McCarty. They're both out of Stanford, both recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for the contributions to the space to date. We've partnered with key advisors that are well-known and well-respected in the financial services and the digital identity industries. And our investors have played a major role in getting, helping us get this technology and our business to where we are today. So I want to give a special shout out to Draper Associates, Franklin Templeton, Samsung Next, and really our entire team of world-class investors for helping support our journey in this critical moment for reusable digital identity. And what we've built here is truly transformational for the reusable identity space. This is a fundamental technology that will be shifting the way identity is verified online globally, just as credit cards revolutionized the commerce market back in the 1950s. Our technology is on the bleeding edge for what is possible in the identity space, and we're happy to share our enthusiasm for it with you here today. If you want to partner with us, use our technology, or just want to learn more or get advice, please reach out to us. You can scan the QR code on the bottom left of the screen to explore our website. And scan the QR code on the bottom right to connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can send me an email at nick@unamid.co, and we'd love to help you prepare for the reusable future. Thank you.

Nick, thank you so much for an amazing presentation. It took me a while to hit my unmute button. Staying with your presentation, we've got some questions coming from people who are watching the summit, which would be great to get you to answer. And then of course, you are going to be joining us at the end of the summit as well for our panel discussion as well. So I look forward to that. But right now, if you— Nick, first question. Onboarding is a great use case for reusable digital identity. Can Continue With One Click apply to other aspects of identity?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we talked about onboarding as the primary use case. Let me just find the perfect right here. So signing up is that primary use case that we talk about, but it really has more capabilities down the road as as well. So it's not just that first account creation, but it's the continuous login. So fundamentally, we are passwordless authentication. And then also, once you are already onboarded onto, let's say, a bank to apply to new, let's say, a credit card product, it's a simple one-click process, right? So today you might have to go through that KYC check again, but with us, it's a one-click signup process, both to apply for products that are within that same company and to apply to others that they might be cross-selling. So let's say you're in Bank of America and you see an ad for Robinhood, right? And it might be an embedded ad that has this continue with one click to sign up for Robinhood and create a brand new account all within the Bank of America application. So you can see how it has tremendous effects in terms of being able to instantly onboard onto other company websites as well from within the existing experience. Another piece I want to highlight here is this selective disclosure piece via zero-knowledge proofs. The classic example for this is when you're going to a bar and they might have to just simply identify, are you over 21 or not? They don't need to see all this information that you're currently passing to them today that you see with that ID that you give to them. But all they really need to know is, is this person over 21 or not? And we can access that data, that metadata really of the fundamental data itself so that we don't have to provide all the data and we can simply say, yes, they have gone through a KYC check or yes, their address is in the US without actually providing the address itself. So it's a really great example of the zero-knowledge proof capabilities that are inherent in our platform. Brilliant. Thank you, Nick.

Next question talks about your technology in particular. How does your technology fit with regulation and compliance?

Yeah, this is a question we get all the time. So we've talked to all the major regulators. We've talked to FinCEN, you know, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the OCC. And long story short, this is fully compliant. So the tech can be used in multiple ways. And it's been said in the— it's been already called out by all these different regulations that it can be passed from company to company. So it explicitly says that we can— you can rely on other parties' KYCs and that it's fully compliant with the Bank Secrecy Act. And explicitly called out here in the regulations. Many fintechs like to work with us not just to streamline that onboarding process and trust that KYC data, but also on the backend to receive that verified required data and pass it through their own processes in the backend without having any user lag on the frontend. So it creates a really seamless process and the ability for them to request additional data if necessary, or rely upon that KYC data that's already in the Unim ID card itself.

Perfect. Next question comes in from Chucks. And to prevent theft of this digital ID signed by Unim, what protection does a user have to prevent a rogue individual reusing this?

Yeah. So an important aspect of this, it's the binding to the device itself and to the user on the device. So as I said, our, our Unim ID card is stored in the secure enclave of the device, the same place where your Face ID data is stored. So we have absolutely no access to it, and it's encrypted end-to-end, and it can only be unlocked by that Face ID, by the biometric of the user that is used to sign up for it. So we know every time that the data that is being passed has been verified on that specific device and by that specific user as verified by their biometrics. We have that two-factor authentication by being something that the user has and something that the user is with their biometrics to make sure that we are as secure as possible and even more secure than what the existing solutions that are out there today. We help prevent synthetic IDs, SIM swapping, and phishing, which are three really critical aspects to fraud that we're seeing today as ways to kind of get around some of the existing processes. This multi-factor authentication helps prevent that.

Perfect. Next question. What does implementation look like with Unum ID?

Yeah, very simple, very simple. So we utilize APIs and we can sit on top of your existing KYC. So if you already have a KYC vendor that you're happy with, that's great. We can sit on top of that. We also have our preferred partners which we can bring and make it even easier for you to implement a brand new KYC process. The entire integration can take as little as an afternoon regardless of whether or not you're an issuer or relying party. And of course, we provide hands-on support throughout that entire process. And if necessary, we can perform custom integrations, often at no cost to the fintech.

Someone else has asked, what kind of opportunities can be created whilst upgrading Digital ID, mainly in the banking sector?

Yeah, I, I think that, you know, the, the biggest hassle is that onboarding process. Whenever you're trying to create a new bank account, it always feels like a struggle just to get there and not to really explore the product itself. So if you are taking away those 5 or 6 minutes it takes to sign up and making that an instant process, it enables your end users to have a much more exploratory view of what you're actually offering as a bank, right? Whether it's different credit services or cross-platform integrations, you know, the ability to advertise other, you know, financial products within your suite itself and onboard onto that with a single click unlocks tremendous opportunities and a huge potential for just the entire industry itself to see more user adoption, user exploration, and overall growth.

Someone said, in your opinion, What does the future of digital ID cards look like?

Yeah, so as I, as I mentioned with credit cards, everyone is now carrying probably multiple credit cards in their, in their wallet. We recognize that identity is, you know, that next frontier of what we really need a network for. And so we've enabled this with the different digital ID cards that we issue. We know that a user— it's really tough to ask a user to go to a single point of signup and create all of their entire identity in one single place. That's asking a lot for the end user, and that's why we embed in the existing processes that are already happening today. So a user, while they're signing up for a fintech site, they can also be signing up for Unim ID at the same time. And we make that issuance of the ID as seamless as possible so that we're not asking the end user to go to anywhere special to do it, but go through the normal processes that they have today and create this added benefit of being able to reuse that identity down the future. So I think that, that aspect of it embedding in the existing process is crucial to the end user adoption.

That's the final question for you, Nick, for now. What are your success metrics to date?

Yeah, yeah, we have a number of them. So we're already handling, you know, on the order of tens of thousands of IDs today. We've seen a lot of success with that verified email product that we already launched with Tim Draper. Tim Draper himself has given us very positive feedback. It's really helped him clean up his inbox. And a lot of fintechs are excited about this product, right? One-click or free KYC is a rather obvious value prop. It's gotten a really warm reception from the fintechs we've already been talking to, and it's enabled by our proprietary tech. You know, that's a huge selling point for, for us in particular as to who to partner with for reusable ID is the user experience that we're enabled, that we're able to enable on behalf of these fintech partners using our patented technology. You know, we're filed, we've already filed this patent around it and we're waiting on the issuance. But what we're doing is really on that bleeding edge of what is possible through the technology itself. It hasn't been around for too long, only a couple of months. And so A lot of the work that we've done in building up this network itself has really led to this critical technology change point that all of these KYC vendors are starting to recognize. And it makes it easy to embed within the existing KYC processes. So the KYC issuers are interested in joining this reusable ID movement. They know it's coming and recognize it as the future, and we provide the easiest path for them. To enable that for their end partners.

Well, Mick, thank you so much, not only for your presentation, but also for, for taking the time to give such, you know, in-depth answers to all of the questions from the people who are watching this summit. So thank you very much. You're going to be joining us a little bit later for our panel discussion as well. So I'll speak to you then.

Excited. Thank you, Rob.

No.