22 June, 2021, London (UK). TrueLayer, Europe’s leading open banking platform, today announced the launch of a new approach to account ownership checks with its Verification API.

Combining open banking with machine learning, the Verification API makes onboarding effortless with success rates that are over 20% higher than credit bureaus and returning a result in seconds, rather than days, compared to manual bank statement checks. By pre-verifying customer’s details, it also simplifies payments setup meaning no more failed transactions.

Multiple TrueLayer clients are using the Verification API, including Authologic, a Y Combinator-backed provider of identity verification solutions.

“Whether you are a fintech, a marketplace, or an ecommerce platform you want to deliver the best possible onboarding experience. We are aggregating different identity verification methods and we are big supporters of using open banking thanks to its ability to make the entire process more intuitive. Working with a market leader like TrueLayer to integrate its Verification API will help us to further strengthen the identity verification process for our customers,” commented Jarek Sygitowicz, co-founder of Authologic.

Traditional verification methods such as bank statement uploads are slow, error prone and create a poor user experience. While open banking offers another approach, existing providers provide access to raw data that requires businesses to then build and maintain their own logic to check that the customer’s name matches their name on file at the bank.

TrueLayer’s Verification API removes these issues. Rather than the time consuming and resource intensive task of building a matching engine, TrueLayer has developed a verification logic that sits on top of open banking rails. It matches the name supplied during the onboarding process with the name on file at the bank, providing a single feed that ensures an immediate and highly accurate response on whether their user’s account has been verified or not. 

As a result, the Verification API delivers significant benefits, including:

  • An accelerated onboarding process from 3 days to just 3 clicks.
  • Coverage spanning all major banks, resulting in a 22.5% higher success rate compared to credit bureau checks.
  • Lower fraud risk through embedded Strong Customer Authentication within the bank verification flow.
  • An improved user experience, with a simple redirect to their banking app to confirm account ownership with a fingerprint or Face ID.
  • Reduced payment failures by using pre-verified account details.
  • Reduced burden on compliance teams by automating checks through a single API call.
  • Reduced burden on engineers who can focus on solving core business problems, rather than building and maintaining name-check logic.

“Verification is the first step to onboarding a new user and yet it can often take days to verify an account owner using traditional methods. Their security is questionable, they’re prone to errors and they take forever,” commented Ossama Soliman, Chief Product Officer at TrueLayer. “It doesn’t need to be that way. With the Verification API we’ve built on top of open banking to create a faster, more secure and more accurate approach to verifying a user’s account. It serves businesses across multiple industries, including financial services, PSPs, wealth management and trading, marketplaces, property and iGaming.”