The Pioneer and the Trusted Leader of Digital Identities: IdentityMind Global

“We offer a SaaS Platform that builds, maintains and analyzes digital identities worldwide.”

The goal of almost every business is to gain more customers and generate more revenue. The Internet enables businesses to find new customers, both domestic and international. While e-commerce has done this for decades, financial services institutions are still catching up. The rise of the FinTech sector over the past couple of years has been led by firms using the Internet to transform how they attract, interact, and validate potential clients.

However, financial services organizations have a much higher risk in new customer acquisition and these risks have to be mitigated appropriately. Achieving a balance between global customer acquisition, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance, is difficult without the proper balance of strategy and technology.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, and incorporated in 2013, IdentityMind Global is the Digital Identities You Can Trust company that globally serves all FinTech companies. IdentityMind’s platform allows companies to perform identity proofing, risk-based authentication, regulatory identification, and ultimately detect and prevent synthetic and stolen identities. Built-in transaction monitoring enables e-commerce fraud prevention, anti-money laundering (AML), and counter-terrorism financing (CTF).

The firm’s patented eDNA™ technology securely tracks the entities involved in each transaction – onboarding, account origination, money transfers, online payments – to build unique digital identity trust reputations. This reputation is anonymously shared among customers in IdentityMind’s Global Identity Network.

In Conversation with Garrett Gafke, President and CEO, IdentityMind:

Share the experience of your first product launch. Was it successful?

Yes, I’m happy to say that it was successful. We built our digital identity-based platform around the needs of the market to detect and prevent risks along with fraud taking place online in the FinTech marketplace.

We operated in stealth mode for several years building the platform and then successfully brought it to market in 2014. It was a very well defined, methodical process that we ran as our team is deeply experienced and had been very successful previously in launching products. Our launch was positively received and we immediately began adding new customers while adding new features to the platform. At the core of the platform, we have always been focused on building a trusted digital identity to inject integrity into digital marketplaces faced by the growing FinTech and digital transaction companies who were, and still are, struggling to handle the onslaught of unknown risks around know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) fraud, and transaction monitoring.

What are the factors that are instrumental in making your brand the best?

There are a few key factors that make IdentityMind stand out:

 For one, IdentityMind is the undisputed leader in trusted digital identities. Pioneering new markets and categories takes courage, risk-taking, passion, patience, and close teamwork. When we first started IdentityMind, we focused on building holistic and trusted digital identities while nobody out there was even talking about digital identities. We were certainly pushing the envelope and carving a new path. IdentityMind filed all of the first patents in digital identities and today we continue filing more patents while growing globally as a company.

Another key factor in making our brand the best is people. We believe we have assembled an exceptionally strong team drawn from security, payments, risk management, customer advocacy and other industries. All possess deep product knowledge and domain expertise. Rarely do you see this type of breadth and depth in one company. Additionally, several team members have worked together in the past for 15 years or more from a start-up to public company. They are attuned to working together which creates an amazing culture.

Finally, being close to your clients is critical. Everyone at IdentityMind dives in and addresses the concerns of our clients which means that we are always available whenever they need us. We are zealous in our mission to help our clients keep the bad actors out while making sure that good customers are approved.

Discuss the obstacles faced by the company in your initial years.

Since we pioneered a new technology, and a new category, market value and funding was a struggle in the early days. Other key challenges included achieving growth and scale and building what is today one of the preeminent partner ecosystems. Today, we have over 35 technology partners fully integrated into our platform, creating greater value to our clients, including leading companies like Neustar, Experian, Twilio, Mitek, TeleSign, MaxMind, TowerData, ID Analytics, IDology, and others.

Challenges predictably arise whenever you take a leadership or “first to market” position. As I like to say, you’re taking a large bite out of the apple. You’ve got to tell the story, make sure that it resonates with your audience, and that it’s timely. Timing plays a critical role and making sure you’ve got a team that is willing to stay at it is critical as well. You’ve got to be experienced in all these matters. This is extremely difficult for someone who has never done this before – to build a company that is pioneering a new market, a new category and is global in nature. Anything around digital transactions and FinTech is global in nature and requires a great deal of understanding the complexities around security, data, and the real-time nature of transactions. You are building a platform along with a surrounding infrastructure that can handle billions of transactions in a real-time manner.

Enlighten us about the roadmap ahead for IdentityMind.

We have some significant announcements coming into the market over the next few months including Version 2.0 our award-winning, trusted digital identities platform for risk and compliance. The new platform is focused on advancing transaction monitoring for anti-money laundering (AML) through the introduction of a user-centric, risk-based approach, which regulators favor. It is designed to provide users with the industry’s most accurate and efficient AML compliance results through dynamic modeling, a transparent access framework, contextual identity analysis designed to help supercharge a company’s compliance efforts and redesigned UI. This will be groundbreaking for the industry.

We also closed a series of funding last year that will be used to grow IdentityMind’s international markets (Asia, Latin America, and Europe), and expand sales and marketing. The funding is also being used to develop our new business unit specifically focused on providing KYC and AML solutions to address the regulatory and compliance requirements of the rapidly growing Security Token Offering/Initial Coin Offering (STO/ICO) and cryptocurrency markets.

Clients Rave about IdentityMind

“IdentityMind is a great solution for our company. The benefits of increased efficiency and resource allocation together with its customizability make it applicable to any direction you choose to take for your business. Their trusted digital identities allows greater certainty when evaluating risk and the ldentityMind team is also incredibly helpful, which is the icing on the cake.”

- Serge Prostran, Compliance Officer, Goldmoney Personal & Business Network

“Our partnership with IdentityMind gives us a powerful advantage in the creation of AirTM, a safe marketplace where anyone, anywhere in the world - including Venezuela - can safely buy or sell crypto without fear of fraud.”

- Rubén Galindo Steckel Payen, Co-Founder, and CEO, AirTM

“IdentityMind had everything we needed to ensure our token sale was conducted lawfully and in accordance with worldwide rules and regulations, there is no platform like theres in the market.”

- Roderik van der Veer, CTO and

Co-founder Databroker DAO

The mastermind behind the Masterstroke

Garrett Gafke, President, and CEO:

Gafke is a successful entrepreneur and Fortune 500 executive. Prior to founding IdentityMind Global, Gafke served as president and CEO of Paymate, an innovative provider of payment and risk management services which was acquired by Flexigroup (FLX). Prior to Paymate, Gafke worked as advisor/interim CEO for several top-tier venture firms and private equity firms. A serial entrepreneur, Gafke has a proven track record of founding and growing great technology companies, having completed five M&A transactions, and two successful IPO’s. He is a popular industry speaker and writer, active angel investor, and board member of early stage companies around Silicon Valley.

“The market demand for digital identity, risk-based solutions in today’s global digital economy is booming. IdentityMind, the pioneer in digital identities since 2013, with hundreds of customers spanning six continents, is uniquely positioned to meet growing global market demand. Version 2.0 of our market tested and globally proven platform introduces fundamental changes to our user interface and analytics making users behind transactions, and their digital representation, the centerpiece for evaluation and analysis of compliance and risk mitigation operations.”