Last week we were invited to stick our heads into the dragons’ den at the prestigious Payments International event in London. This sort of event, also known as a Shark Tank is where growth companies like HooYu are invited to pitch in front of a panel of seasoned experts who after posing fiendishly difficult questions then pronounce their verdict.
The HooYu team is happy to say that we won the Shark Tank, winning both the popular audience vote and the blessing of the sharks. Here’s a blog post to share three reasons why we won this award:
1. HooYu empowers consumers, not just businesses, to check an identity
At HooYu, our philosophy is that it shouldn’t just be big banks and clever online businesses that are able to verify a person’s identity. In today’s digital age where we increasingly transact or interact with a stranger we meet online, sometimes one person wants to prove the identity of another person so they know who they’re dealing with.
For example, the parent finding a tutor for their child, the person buying a second-hand car and about to hand over £3,000 to somebody they haven’t met before or the couple about to book a dream vacation at an idyllic villa in the south of France.
The scenarios are endless. HooYu is democratising identity technology and empowering consumers with the same level of technology that businesses have enjoyed for the last 15 years.
Consumer users can try Hooyu for free here https://www.hooyu.com/register
Businesses can learn more about HooHYu here https://business.hooyu.com/
2. It’s your identity, you should control it
HooYu Identify has been designed with maximum data protection controls in mind. When we enable one person to check the identity of another person we don’t pass over sensitive data like date of birth or address or the image of their ID document. In fact, we only confirm what attributes have been verified and what sources have been used to check their identity.
The person whose identity is being checked also has the ability to decide to offer less or more information about their identity. Don’t want to share your selfie? Don’t want to share your age range or your phone number? You’re in control and can opt out of sharing particular aspects of your identity.
And what happens with the data we use to confirm an identity? For both our business and our consumer models. we don’t retain customer data, we delete the data, retaining just a record of the verification that took place.
3. HooYu Identify is a powerful combination of different identity technologies
Our experience in the identity space is that identity technologies are fragmented. You have some companies that are good at database checks, some that do document verification, some that offer a biometric test and others that use a digital footprint analysis. HooYu is the first platform that unites all these different identity technologies.
When a user goes through the HooYu confirmation process, they are asked to take a selfie, share their online identity from Facebook or LinkedIn or Amazon or Google+, then they are asked to take a photo of their passport or driving licence or utility bill. HooYu then looks at these sources and checks that it’s not a fake or forged ID document and that it’s a real legitimate digital footprint.
Our secret sauce is an identity scoring engine that that sits across and governs these identity technologies. We don’t just pass our clients the results of these technologies in isolation. Instead we look across the sources and cross references the data provided.
The result? Checking a database or getting a copy of an identity document is no longer the defence it used to be. HooYu Identify is a new way to verify customer identity using multiple sources of identity giving a three-dimensional view of your customers.
