
BlockScore (YC S14) Lands $2M In Funding For Making I.D. Verification Easier - vollmarj
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/26/blockscore-lands-2m-in-funding-for-making-i-d-verification-easier/
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rdl
I'd love this for a special case -- account recovery. A system where your
account is only as secure as a recovery email address and/or knowledge based
authentication and/or social engineering of an account-reset staffer is pretty
insecure.

Front loading that on new account creation is pretty dumb commercially,
though, especially for low end services or non-financial services. You should
do something with trivial signup and then progressive authentication. A
holistic risk thing vs. binary.

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alainmeier
Account recovery is a great use case. Any mission critical applications for
businesses should require more than security questions or a phone call in
order to gain access to accounts.

We agree that front-loading is not always the best solution and are working on
systems to help firms with progressive authentication, too.

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callmeed
This is really cool and I have a possible startup opportunity that could use
this.

One question if there's anyone from BlockScore listening–I've seen some
finance/bitcoin startups that require you to upload a picture of your ID with
your webcam via WebRTC. Does BlockScore have anything like this in the works?
I think a drop-in JS library for this would be really useful.

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nadaviv
I was wondering about this too. I'm looking for a system that verifies
uploaded identity documents, but it seems like BlockScore doesn't do that and
only focuses on knowledge based authentication.

Does anyone have recommendations for companies that provides identity document
verification, ideally in addition to knowledge based authentication? (one that
I recently spoke with is Jumio, but they don't have a pay-as-you-go pricing
model, which I really prefer)

Edit: to the BlockScore team - any chance you might support that in the
future?

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Atlas
We do work with document collection/verification systems to verify information
extracted from the documents. You still have to verify the information that
those systems return against watchlists and other database, and BlockScore is
the easiest way to be compliant. Send me an email and we can chat about your
specific needs. support@blockscore

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chatmasta
At Starup Weekend Seattle last summer, my team and I built this _exact_
product. Seriously, down to the last detail. Obviously it was a prototype but
the pieces were all there.

Our business pitch was to focus on developers for easy integration. Out of
sixty participants, we won best pitch judged by our peers, but didn't even
place top 3 with the judges (VC's plus CEOs), who could not see how this was a
"defensible" idea. Their issue was that these knowledge based questions
(called "wallet questions" \-- multiple choice, like "what street did you live
on in 2005?) were from public data sources, and therefore, not "defensible."
In the judges minds, any large company like Transunion could replicate this
business fairly trivially.

I argued then, and I'll argue now, that there's a lot to be said for first
mover advantage, developer friendliness, and a small, agile engineering team
to back it up. Sure, all those data sources are public. But the existing API's
for accessing them really suck. Transunion and other incumbent competitors
have shown no indication that they're capable of improving upon those API's.
Even if they did, it would only be out of reaction to a company like this, and
at that point the battle for developers is already lost.

Best of luck to this team. With the YC name and a developer friendly approach,
I maintain that this product has a very good shot at profitability. Its
customers are developers, and you can charge a nominal fee per check, because
those developers are likely building a product that profits per customer. So
these guys can go after tens, or hundreds, of developers, but reach
potentially hundreds of thousands of customers. It's a great business model.

This story also goes to show that ideas are a some a dozen. It's the
execution, team, and positioning that will determine success. Good luck!

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acmemonument
Does this have anything to do with bitcoin/block chain?

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mhluongo
They help with KYC/id verification. Originally bitcoin companies were their
target market.

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wslh
What are their competitors? I think LifeLock is doing something similar.

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thesimon
Jumio. Uses upload of passport though.

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alainmeier
Jumio is actually a complementary service to ours. Jumio pulls information off
of identification, but the information is not verified. You can use us to
verify and authenticate that information.

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theneelpatel
it's BlockScore from startup engineering on coursera..

