As 2021 wraps up, we are taking a step back to celebrate team accomplishments that have led to 8x revenue growth to secure us $13.5M to build next-generation KYC standards.
At Passbase, we not only have a vision for how the future of digital identity should be, but firmly believe in the values that will help get us there. To give you a sense of how we think about our work, I will group our accomplishments based on our four company values:
- Big Focused Mission
- Iterate Towards Excellence
- Lead With Empathy
- Championship Team Culture
Big Focused Mission
Passbase is committed to building a new identity infrastructure that powers the next generation of digital services – one gives control of identity information back to individuals. To build towards our vision, we welcomed new team members across all our expanding departments.
To drive business growth, we welcomed Marcela Heywood as VP of Marketing, along with Mike Mechaly, Derek Woods, and Alek Varela. On the engineering side, we brought on Marius Virbicianskas, Andrey Ilin, Nosa Omorodion, Yi Zeng, Linda Rian, Scott Livingstone, and Kofo Okesola. Our growing global team has helped us serve the growing Passbase community with a host of new feature rollouts and upgrades.
Iterate Towards Excellence
This year, we shipped features bi-weekly to give customers an edge in their respective industries, from real estate and hospitality to FinTech and crypto. Some highlights from this year were:
- Advanced customization for teams to create a branded identity verification flow that fits natively into their product
- Biometric authentication to help companies not only verify new users, but also reduce friction for existing users with a convenient way to re-verify themselves at logins and transactions
- Identity Auditor for teams to have one source of truth for checking identities, handling cases, and retriggering checks to improve security and fraud prevention
- Extending ongoing monitoring to be activated from the Passbase Dashboard and integrated into your app’s case handling logic via the Passbase API and webhooks
- New additional checks such as proof of address, insurance cards, and CDC Covid-19 vaccination card scan options to give companies more assurance
These features have given companies the flexibility to orchestrate their identity verification on a global scale, with localized needs. In parallel, we have improved features that impact business processes and operations, such as improving our liveness detection for a smoother verification experience and re-architecting our Browser SDK V4.
Many of our upgrades required little or no changes for Passbase customers. You can see all the updates here.
Lead With Empathy
We developed Passbase as a pivot from our company’s origins as a crypto wallet, when we needed a solution for our own digital identity and KYC challenges. With a keen understanding of the gaps in online identity verification today, we are committed to building a best-in-class solution for Web3 and sharing insights with the community as we make strides together.
In 2021, we shared our perspectives on key topics that are relevant for Web3 and brought together a community of leaders who are also working to build customer-centric products that secure digital identities. Together, we held great discussions, including those from our latest webinars on customer-centric KYC in FinTech and staying ahead of crypto regulations.
We also published resources on how to incorporate KYC into your security, fraud prevention, customer success, and conversion rate optimization strategies, to ensure we addressed needs from different organizational perspectives.
Championship Team Culture
At Passbase, we have a “championship team culture,” which pushes us to product excellence. Over the last year, we’re proud to see our results recognized through various accolades and awards. In the spring, we co-led a workshop at the Hubspot ELEVATE Growth Accelerator with Kim Walsh, Hubspot’s Global VP of Go-To-Market Partnerships. In June, our Biometric Authentication feature was featured in Product Hunt’s daily newsletter. By fall, we received the Paris FinTech Forum Jury Award out of a group of 400+ globally considered companies. And to close off the year, Passbase was listed as one of the top German startups and companies along with household names such as Flink, Tink, Rocket Internet, Delivery Hero, Omio, AUTO1 Group, and Lingoda. By keeping our heads down and shipping features, we delivered impact to the global business community.
Stay tuned for our new year’s announcements!
With 2021 behind us, what’s next? This year has been a breakout year for crypto and DeFi, which has brought discussions on digital identity to the forefront. These companies need a scalable solution that can be set up quickly, easily maintained, and also locally adapted. Companies need customizable and automated workflows to handle cases at scale. We are ready to meet those needs. Get a sneak peek of the identity verification policy and workflows coming your way early next year in this blog post.
More to come in the new year!
