Footprint

At Footprint, our mission has always been to build a one-click KYC solution that eliminates the friction-fraud dilemma. With fraudsters getting smarter, verifying that the person behind the device is authentic has never been more crucial. We aim to make it nearly impossible for bad actors to create synthetic identities and bypass tamper checks. 🚀 Introducing the Footprint Toolkit Unlike traditional KYC solutions that operate behind a black box, Footprint brings transparency and efficiency to the forefront. By leveraging App Clips for iOS and Instant Apps for Android, we ensure a seamless identity verification process that ties a real identity to PII. This includes confirming that the phone number is linked to a non-jailbroken device running legitimate code on an authentic Apple/Google device from a non-spoofed IP address. 🔒 Device Attestation: Raising the Cost of Fraud Using sophisticated device attestation and anti-fraud frameworks from Apple and Google, Footprint verifies that devices are not compromised. This approach significantly increases the cost of fraud, making it prohibitively expensive for adversaries to commit fraud en masse. 📱 Embracing Zero-Trust Fraud With 85% of Americans owning a smartphone, and the vast majority using iOS 14 or Android, the adoption of App Clips and passkeys is seamless. By ensuring each device is tied to a unique identity, we make multi-identity fraud on the same device a thing of the past.

Data security is the top priority at Footprint. Recent news has reminded us how important data security is. Sadly, many companies are still either not protecting data at all or using encryption at rest. Today, that is not enough. Footprint takes advantage of a radical new paradigm known as Confidential Computing-- enabling us to process sensitive data in highly-isolated, secure environments that far outpace the typical approaches used by businesses today. Check out the blog below for more information on our Vaulting solution.

Our team is growing! Who should we bring on to help our mission?

There are three steps to conduct wire fraud. 1. Acquire a stolen Identity. 2. Onboard onto a credit platform with said stolen identity. 3. Use new line of credit to steal money. None of these steps can be stopped with a backend KYC tool. With the recent data breaches, there are millions of valid sets of identity information available for purchase on the dark web. With Footprint, we unify fraud detection and identity verification, allowing you to toggle on and off friction in real time.

Once again, this is absolutely NOT fraud advice. But if you wanted to contribute to the $456 Million lost in Zelle scams, this is how you may do it. Digital finance can be great for society, but it won't be if part of the social contract is billions of dollars lost to identity theft each year. Phishing/account recovery scams are on the rise. Auth<>Security<>Identity all really go together, and it's why we've built Footprint to solve across these areas.

To protect against fraud, we know you need to live on the frontend. With major data breaches happening every week, fraudsters can easily acquire valid PII online. A tool that is simply checking that the PII exists in a database has no way of detecting this fraud. On the frontend, we can run behavioral biometrics, device checks and dynamically request additional information based on risk signals. However, many people want to control their entire UX. That is why we launched Onboarding Components. Onboarding Components take all the magic that resides within the Footprint embedded onboarding and exposes them as individual web/React components you can embed, fully stylize, and control inside your product.

Sharing my most recent investor update. It's about my dog Oreo, who sadly left us after 17.5 amazing years. What my essay talks about are all of the lessons Oreo taught me about happiness. How it could be there on any day, in any moment, waiting for us. For as much as entrepreneurship is about the destination, it is important to remember each day was a destination in your mind at one point. We must cherish and appreciate those small moments. Because there will always be a new destination. Happiness delayed is not happiness earned. To my best boy--I know you're running around a garden somewhere, meeting new friends. And to anyone who reads this, I hope it inspires you to reflect on how you engage with happiness. https://lnkd.in/dvvmdUjU

Happy July - Wanted to share some updates from the world of Footprint. 👣 Custom Documents - Through Footprint, request any PDF document and we will run tamper detection on it to streamline the verification process. 👣 Compliance Automation - Banks can log in and get a granular view of their fintech partners and end users. In one place, they can analyze the onboarding process, view audit logs, request marketing materials and other reports, and dive into individual-level detail. 👣 KYB Insights - To help our customers confidently onboard businesses, we launched new insights that include the ability to see how we have verified business information, pull Secretary of State filings directly from state databases, and have a street view of the company's primary address. Stay tuned for more product updates coming this summer!

There's been a lot of news for portable identity of late. We've never gotten more inbound than in the last few weeks with Plaid's Layer announcement and Clear's partnership with Public. Folks have wanted to know how we Footprint feel about it. Huge players getting into the space. I relay that firstly it feels exciting--both a validation of why we started the company, and a time to continue to double down on product and architecture. Also, these entrants do not feel all that new to us. We wrote about Plaid and Identity last June in a public post. A lot of what we wrote then still stands true. We believe portable identity is not one-size-fits-all. There is a lot of nuance in the term. I figured I'd share what I've sent to folks more publicly. It is about how we think about what defines portable identity, and why we think we're well suited to deliver the best product in the space. As I say in the piece, I also want to congratulate the Plaid/Cognito and Clear/Sora teams on the hard work to get here--it really is an exciting time for portable identity! https://lnkd.in/eUra-mvp

A special edition of not fraud advice: not hacking advice. Evolve and the great data leak of fintech. Some people find it strange when we say Footprint is a security company. But that's how we built it from day one. Alex's background is as a world-class cryptographer (his adviser at MIT is a Turing award winner who invented the ZKP). Why does security interact with onboarding? Because that is where all of the PII ends up. If you onboard a user, you must securely vault their data. If you don't duplicates get out for people to create fraudulent accounts after a breach (third-party identity risk). To de-duplicate the world and give people back their identities, you need to have strong security to do it. But above all if you build in fintech/Financial Services, people need to trust you'll take care of their data. It's truly the least you can do.