Bringing integrity into digital identities with IdentityMind

“Digital identities you can trust.”

A Palo Alto, California start-up, founded in 2013, is changing the way businesses think about risk and compliance.

IdentityMind, ledby Garrett Gafke, founder and CEO, pioneered the idea of digital identity. IdentityMind wanted to restore integrity to the digital marketplace.

A digital identity is a representation of a person or business entity in the digital world. It  is created from a diverse range of static and dynamic attributes, such as IP address, mobile device number, geolocation, payment information, email address, national IDs, driver’s license, and more. Because identity theft and account take over are growing threats on the Web, knowing who is really on the other end of the transaction is key to building trust. This is where IdentityMind comes into the picture. 

The first step

The IdentityMind platform delivers risk management and compliance capabilities on top of patented trusted digital identity technology. Generally, when you take a different approach to solving a problem, you need to explain it to buyers in a way that shows the value in the new approach. So, when it first launched, prospects wanted to know why digital identities were part of the platform. After seeing that fraud prevention solutions on the market could not handle the complexities of e-commerce transactions and the transformation to digital, IdentityMind felt a new approach was in order. They pioneered the concept of building and digital identities based on their digital information and called the engine behind it eDNA.

eDNA securely tracks the entities involved in each transaction, creates identities based on that information and leverages machine learning to analyze those identities to provide a reputation score. The net result is that companies can more effectively identify and reduce potential fraud, evaluate merchant account applications, onboard accounts, enable identity verification services, and identify potential money laundering. 

Continuous innovation

 IdentityMindis continually innovating. They spend a good amount of time interacting with customers, prospects and the market to identity which trends and/ or needs they want to address. One example is their recently released IdentityLink API. The IdentityLink API helps evaluate and analyze the associations within large quantities of transaction data to help in accurate risk predictions. It is available through a standard Rest API, and can be added to a customers risk and complianc e technology stack without the need to replace or discontinue any of their current systems. Their vision is to put financial services companies, fintech companies and merchants ahead of the fraudsters and allow them to more easily meet their compliance obligations. 

IdentityMind is about 50 people today. CEO Garrett Gafke says, “We worked hard on our culture. It is a very flat and diverse culture devoid of the typical politics that distract companies from executing. We pride ourselves on direct lines of communications within and outside the company.” 

Meet the mastermind 

Garrett Gafke is a successful entrepreneur and Fortune 500 Executive, blending early stage action with public company knowledge. Prior to founding IdentityMind Global, Mr. Gafke served as President & CEO of Paymate, an innovative provider of payment and risk management services which was acquired by Flexigroup (FLX). Prior to Paymate, Mr. Gafke worked as advisor/Interim-CEO for several top tier venture firms and private equity firms. Mr. Gafke has served as President and CEO for SteelEye which was acquired by SIOS a public Japanese company, and was a member of the senior executive team that built and took CyberSource (CYBS) and Trintech (TTPA) public, the former of which Visa acquired in 2010 for $2 billion. He helped build VeriFone’s Internet Commerce Division (PAY) which was later acquired by Hewlett Packard (HQP) for $1.2 billion, and served as the Group Vice President and General Manager for Cardinal Health’s (CAH) technology division. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Garrett has a proven track record of founding and growing great technology companies, having completed five M&A transactions, and two successful IPO’s. Mr. Gafke is an active angel investor and Board Member of early stage companies around Silicon Valley.

“IdentityMind lets you see who’s on the other end of the transaction so you can identify the good guys you want to do business with and the bad guys that you want to avoid.”