Cognito
Identity Verification Made Simple

Modern businesses expanding into wider markets invest significantly in progressive strategies that help them attain new users and at a rapid rate. At the same time, these businesses also need a simple and effective way to verify the identity of each user without compromising their personal data or complicating their sign-up experience. According to Alain Meier, co-founder and CEO of Cognito, companies today have become more cognizant of the existing challenges in marketing and sales landscape that keeps them away from expensive integration solutions working with outdated technologies like SOAP and XML.

There is a transformative wave among these companies who are rapidly moving toward more low friction and well-documented solutions that do not unnecessarily obfuscate the technology in an effort to “protect intellectual property”. This change has paved the way for strong APIs like Cognito to deliver simplified identity verification.

Cognito strives to replace the social security number and knowledge based authentication as the primary means of identity verification in a world where it is alarmingly easy for malicious hackers to access everyone’s identity data. Leveraging cutting-edge technology integrations and partnerships, Cognito empowers its clients in optimizing their customer sign-up process and makes it more seamless. The Cognito API sources its reliable data reference from authoritative databases such as local governments, federal governments, and financial institutions. Equipped with real-time sanction and watchlist scanning, Cognito can easily augment customer due diligence processes and determine potential compliance risks before doing business with a customer. Meier states, “We don’t believe that API interfaces are proprietary. What matters is what those APIs are capable of doing.”

Cognito’s API pulls back the user data using information from its client’s signup flow.

We don’t believe that API interfaces are proprietary. What matters is what those APIs are capable of doing

The API’s flexible scoring system helps the client in effortlessly determining the relevance and quality of customer-submitted data in real time. Instead of collecting all of the required information at once, Cognito allows the client to gradually collect additional customer information that is available and pull back the rest of the data that is needed by their business to onboard the customer. For instance, if the client’s sign up flow only collects name, phone number, and email, then Cognito can verify their customer’s identity with merely just a name and phone number. In case the client is still unable to verify the user, they have an option to prompt the user for additional information without any extra expenditure. By structuring their verification flow with gradual information collection, the clients can minimize the friction for the maximum number of users. “Gradual verifications are a powerful way for both decreasing the number of fields collected from users on sign up and increasing the security of on-boarding users by connecting them with their mobile phone number,” adds Meier.

Currently, Cognito is known to be the only company that is focused on using phone numbers as a customer’s primary means of authentication and identity while using regulated data. The company is gaining an edge by re-imagining identity verification services from the perspective of the users and the types of experiences they want to have. With a robust roadmap of expanding their clientele in America, Cognito is planning to augment its partner relationships and work with the best data in the industry. “In the coming days, we have several upcoming deals that we think will keep us comfortably ahead in terms of match rates and breadth of demographics,” concludes Meier.