Berbix: Instant ID Verification Making ‘May I See Your Driver's License’ a Thing of the Past

I’ve got something nice I want to say about the DMV. Despite the horror stories, my most recent visit was a vast improvement on the bad old days. Thanks to some nice integration of online processes, I was able to make my appointment online and to scan my passport into the system so it was on file digitally before I arrived. As a result, it took just moments for a DMV staffer to see that the passport I brought with me was legit and that I was, in fact, the person in the photograph. I was in and out of there in 45 minutes. Not bad.

But not good enough. If anything the COVID-19 crisis has taught us that in a world dependent on digital services we need an all-digital way to prove our identities. With such an online identity verification system in place, the only reason we’d need to step into a DMV office again would be to take an actual, on-the-road driving test. 

This isn’t just about not having to carry plastic, germ-carrying forms of ID in the brick-and-mortar world—though that is a big deal at the moment. It’s about unleashing the ability for companies to create seamless new experiences that boost business and improve people's lives. What keeps many offline experiences offline is an inability to establish trust. This all goes away with digital identity verification. For consumers, this means fewer visits to the DMV, the bank, or the rental car counter (the bane of my existence). For businesses, it means lower overhead, better customer experiences, increased trust, and dramatically less fraud.  

For the first time, this isn’t a pipe dream. Given advances in machine learning and other technologies, software can now spot fake IDs and other types of fraud more quickly, cheaply, and effectively than the best human screener. If this became standard operating procedure, it would provide rocket fuel for commerce of all kinds. Like it or not, COVID-19-related distancing is just accelerating a trend towards social isolation that was already well underway. Billions of people now favor digital alternatives to real-world activities, from how they interact with friends to how they do their shopping. Anything that removes any friction from all these transactions will surely have a far-reaching impact.

We aren’t starting from scratch. For almost a decade, first-generation digital identity verification technology companies have offered basic online services that confirm customers’ identity by having them upload a selfie that a human screener, usually in a low-cost labor market, could compare to the passport or driver's license photo on file. But this can take minutes, and people make mistakes.

Alongside my Mayfield Partner - Rajeev Batra - we had a chance to learn about the challenges with legacy identity verification technologies by spending time with Steve Kirkham and Eric Levine, who led the Trust and Safety team at Airbnb.  For years, Steve & Eric woke up with a mission to ensure our stays in a stranger’s home were incident free.  After trying nearly every solution in the market, their belief was that a new generation of ID verification solutions could replace humans with technology that does the job faster, and more effectively and securely, which ultimately would increase trust & safety for so many of us that have stayed in an AirBnB. 

Steve & Eric set out to create a company - Berbix - whose mission would be to make the internet safer by providing a better & faster alternative for ID verification.  Berbix uses sophisticated machine learning techniques to instantly spot fraud that no human eye could detect. The solution includes “liveness” checks, which require people to react to real-time instructions rather than capture static selfie images. This foils anyone from passing themselves off as someone else by taking a “selfie” with their photo. 

By leveraging automation, Berbix’s second-generation technologies have improved the user experience of identity verification enough to make it viable for an array of new use cases. Consider gig-economy services such as ride sharing. Not only can Lyft be certain that I am the registered customer I claim to be, but the company can also make sure that prospective drivers have legitimate licenses and no recent felonies. Lyft can also confirm the driver’s identity at the start of each ride to quickly ensure he hasn’t rented his account to someone else. 

Here at Mayfield, Rajeev & I and the rest of the Mayfield team deeply aligned with Steve & Eric’s vision and the technologies’ potential, leading their Series A investment. Clearly, businesses also understand the potential of removing the friction associated with proving customers’ identities. According to a 2018 study by McKinsey, the market for ID verification-as-a-service will grow from $10 billion in 2017 to between $16 billion and $20 billion in 2022.

Still, more innovation is ahead. We need new thinking to establish widely used, deeply trusted identity networks that appeal to a wide range of companies and consumers. It takes both sides to become standard practice. 

A logical place to start is in the public sector, which can introduce the concept of online ID verification to millions of citizens at a time. For example, the U.S. government lets people who want to get a Real ID choose from various identify-proofing services.  The Australian government, meanwhile, is rolling out a MyGovID system that will allow people to verify their identity via a mobile app, rather than a physical ID card. The EU is also working on a digital standard that would work across member countries.

Once the kinks in these systems are worked out, millions of consumers will be educated about the advantages of post-plastic identity verification. But for them to trust the systems enough to actually use them, the platforms must leave individuals in control of their personal information. We live in an era of rising mistrust for institutions, when people worry about giving carte blanche access to companies like Facebook and Google. If the only way to live in a post-plastic world is by making all of one’s sensitive personal details available to the hundreds or thousands of companies we do business, many people wouldn’t do it.

I’d gladly make my passport and even financial and health information available to an identity network if it would make my life easier—so long as I could control access. My bank doesn’t need to see my health records, and my doctor doesn’t need to see my bank account. 

Who will be the keeper of all this precious data? Personally, I don’t think consumers will trust any company that could benefit by improperly mining that data. Others may not trust their government to do the job. How to get around this chicken-and-egg problem? I believe we’ll need new kinds of platforms, whose sole function will be to serve as good stewards of the information. Companies such as LastPass, which charges users to encrypt and provide single sign-on to all of their passwords, could provide such a model. Other independent next-generation ID verification providers, like Berbix, would be good candidates as well.

No doubt, consumer habits die hard. Sharing your digital selves with nameless, faceless identity networks might feel a lot scarier than the familiar feeling of flashing your ID and filling out forms to apply for jobs, join a political organization, or switch doctors. But just because something is familiar doesn’t make it more secure. My information is safer within a carefully protected database than it is by continually handing my ID to complete strangers and filling out forms that get passed from cubicle to cubicle for processing.

Done correctly, all-digital identity verification would spare us the tedium of repeatedly proving who we are. It would reduce our worries of falling victim to identity thieves. And it would be good for business. Just as companies add the ability to take payments online by adding a few lines of code from Stripe, they’d be able to differentiate themselves from rivals stuck in the bad old days of plastic IDs and maddening log-in experiences. 

Everyone would win—especially the entrepreneurs who figure out how to unlock this latent value.  We are looking forward to working with Steve & Eric in their effort to make our entire digital lives safe.