IDfy Story.
How The Seed Of IDfy Was Planted
As with many stories from the city of dreams called Mumbai, this story too begins with a hunt for a home.
Ashok had just returned to India from London and was looking for an apartment to rent. One apartment, in particular, caught his eye. However, the elderly owner of the house was the non-trusting kind. A trait that had left her house unoccupied for almost a year.
Ashok tried persuading her. But nothing seemed to work. Until she realised that Ashok is of South Indian origin. Suddenly she was happy to have him as a tenant. All because she thought that “South Indians do not fight”.
To give him credit, Ashok did not shatter her misconception at the time. But it did get the noodle spinning in his head about the trust gap in the world. People need to make better informed decisions rather than go by flawed preconceived notions, Ashok thought.
How IDfy was Visualised
A wedding party is a perfect breeding ground for a lot of things, but a multi-million dollar business idea is usually not one. IDfy is an exception.
In Dec 2010, Ashok and Vineet were attending Vineet’s brother’s wedding. There was a makeshift bar in the boot of a car, known in Delhi as the ‘Car-o-Bar’ when the discussion shifted to problems that can and should be solved with technology. The problem of lack of trust and the need to bridge the trust gap resonated with everybody.
Ashok and Vineet decided to bring this idea into reality.
The Wonder Years
Those who were there then consider the early days of IDfy – a renegade bootstrapped startup – as the best years of their working life. This is when the IDfy culture started to take root. Working intense hours but partying even harder. Knowing that everyone succeeds or fails together and helping each other achieve the common goal.
During those days we learnt to celebrate our victories. Like the first client. Or the first major client (Vodafone). Or when we hit big time when the taxi aggregation sector took off.
We also learnt to celebrate our failures.
This period is affectionately remembered at IDfy as the Sakinaka days, named after our office location.
Big failure that was a great learning experience
We decided to make it easier for people to get jobs by giving them a unique ID that will have all verifications and checks done and updated at all times. Think of it as LinkedIn for Blue Collar workers. We called it OneID.
We enrolled 300,000 users in 2 weeks. While people really saw the value, unfortunately, at the time, corporations didn’t. Jobs for them were not forthcoming. We were a bit too early for the market.
That’s when we recognised who we really are. B2C wasn’t quite in our DNA. We figured that we are made to be in the enterprise space, solving problems for companies and helping them serve the community better.
Discovering ourselves in the year of the pandemic
The year 2020 will go down in IDfy history as a seminal year, one in which we discovered who we are and things that we are capable of.
When the pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown we, like many others, were staring at rock bottom. Our revenues dropped suddenly at a time we were aiming for rapid growth.
This is when the IDfy spirit came to the fore. Everyone pulled together for the company in the face of severe personal challenges.
We launched new products – Video KYC and Zero Touch Onboarding. We took HDFC Bank’s Video KYC Live. We were onboarding 2 delivery executives every minute for Amazon helping them meet surging demand.
2020 is the year when IDfy suddenly grew up from an adolescent to an adult, ready to take our place in the sun.
Voice of the Customers & Awards
Exceptional accuracy and speed across verification processes.
Abhinav Puneeth
Director
IDfy has significantly improved our fraud prevention capabilities with accurate verification.
Kirti Patil
CTO
The platform enables seamless identity checks that scale efficiently across teams.
Sameer Jadhav
Vice President
A reliable system that ensures compliance without compromising user experience.
Ankit Shah
Head of Risk
Fraud detection and verification workflows have become effortless using IDfy.
Rohit Mehta
Product Lead
The checks and verifications built in IDfy's help us identify and prevent fraud at source to a large extent.
Sneha Kapoor
Operations Manager
Exceptional accuracy and speed across verification processes.
Abhinav Puneeth
Director
IDfy has significantly improved our fraud prevention capabilities with accurate verification.
Kirti Patil
CTO
The platform enables seamless identity checks that scale efficiently across teams.
Sameer Jadhav
Vice President
A reliable system that ensures compliance without compromising user experience.
Ankit Shah
Head of Risk
Fraud detection and verification workflows have become effortless using IDfy.
Rohit Mehta
Product Lead
The checks and verifications built in IDfy's help us identify and prevent fraud at source to a large extent.
Sneha Kapoor
Operations Manager
Exceptional accuracy and speed across verification processes.
Abhinav Puneeth
Director
IDfy has significantly improved our fraud prevention capabilities with accurate verification.
Kirti Patil
CTO
The platform enables seamless identity checks that scale efficiently across teams.
Sameer Jadhav
Vice President
A reliable system that ensures compliance without compromising user experience.
Ankit Shah
Head of Risk
Fraud detection and verification workflows have become effortless using IDfy.
Rohit Mehta
Product Lead
The checks and verifications built in IDfy's help us identify and prevent fraud at source to a large extent.
Sneha Kapoor
Operations Manager