Green Sheet interviews Jason Howard, CEO at Caf

On Jan. 24, 2023, the company released its Know Your Everything platform, a solution designed to drive revenue by enabling businesses to protect and enhance the digital user experience. Days later, Jason Howard, former chief revenue officer at Caf, took the reins as CEO. In an exclusive interview with The Green Sheet, Howard shared insights about the new platform and identity management trends. Following are interview highlights.

What trends are you seeing in the threatscape and how are you helping companies mitigate them?

Attackers are getting ever more sophisticated and constantly adapting to the security landscape. They are increasingly using synthetic identities, which are identities stitched together from stolen data to essentially create a brand new fake identity that looks real. There is also the rise of "Fraud-as-a-Service" tools that untrained fraudsters, with no technical knowledge, can buy off the shelf to help them launch attacks. These often even come with instructional videos and customer support lines.

What are companies getting right about digital identity verification and onboarding and which areas need improvement?

Companies are putting an emphasis on tools and protocols to fight fraud in this space; they recognize the problem and are spending to stop it, which is good. The problem is that many are also hindering good users when they implement these security tools; they struggle to find the right balance between stopping attacks and creating too much friction for all users.

How does Caf's Know Your Everything platform help service providers verify and onboard customers?

Caf's platform combines advanced computer vision ML models, an AI-powered decisions engine and sophisticated identity orchestration with an extensive collection of biometrics and identity databases. This technology delivers automated customer onboarding, KYC, KYB, fraud prevention, authentication, and document verification and background check solutions to clients in highly regulated industries.

Which aspects of your platform are particularly popular with partners and end-users?

Our clients love that everything on the platform is automated, which helps their internal teams focus on more high-value tasks. Also, by approving more new good users, we help them grow the business and drive revenue.

What differentiates your company from others in your space?

Caf provides a true end-to-end platform that lets companies secure the entire customer journey, from onboarding to sign up, through continual monitoring of accounts.

What characteristics of your company and technology are attributable to your company's growth?

I think our rapid growth shows that the technology works. Businesses are looking for a solution to the problem of balancing security with user experience. They spend a lot of money on anti-fraud tools and, in many cases, find these stand-alone solutions do not make much of a difference. At the same time, many good users are being flagged in cases of false positives, thus hurting the business. We are helping companies successfully deal with these issues.

What steps can payments industry stakeholders take to protect customer identity in 2023?

These days, a person's true, authentic identity can now be an amalgamation of many online personas. It is crucial for businesses to start to look at integrated identity solutions that deliver the right level of context-based insights that can evolve as use cases change.

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