How does one go about preventing credit frauds, ensuring the reliability of someone that one proposes to give a loan to, or, more generally, taking safer decisions when it comes to something as tricky as financial risk management? This isn’t a new question, of course – it’s been around as long as people have borrowed and bartered, and over the ages the finance industry has come up with several methods of trying to address this concern. The latest has been to take the approach of statistical modelling, and one has to admit, this has helped matters tremendously. Banks are able to paint a more detailed picture of what their overall risk profile is, and avoid seriously risky situations.

The last year-and-a-half have been the most amazing roller-coaster ride for IDfy. We have grown from 20 people to about 150 at the moment. We continue to grow, and expect to hit the 200 people benchmark within the next 2 months. While we have grown significantly, we have tried to retain the start-up ethos. What that means is that we learn, implement, and change quickly, but most importantly, we listen. We listen to our customers and our employees, as well as our partners.

I remember one of my customer meetings last month quite vividly. It was with the HR General Manager of a multi-national manufacturing company. Perhaps one of the most affable people I have met, he spoke at length about his experience managing HR in different companies and interspersed his speech with lively anecdotes and his opinion about the changing role of HR. “HR owes its origin to Industrial Relations” he began. The nature of the workforce has, obviously, changed a lot since the Industrial Revolution, but it is not difficult to imagine that about a hundred and fifty years back in Victorian England, there might have been a clique of managers specialising in dealing with workers in coalmines or shipyards.