Globally, background verification saw a surge after 9/11. In the early 2000s, Ajay Trehan, CEO and founder AuthBridge had founded CoreBPO – his second entrepreneur- ial venture. He served clients from Europe and the US and with global mandates evolving at the time, these clients started asking for background checks of employees working on their account and data back in India. Tre- han saw this as an opportunity and started this journey. “At the time there were no protocols, methodologies or even an understanding of what clients would want to verify. It will be fair to say that this space in India has matured along with us,” says the 49-year-old Trehan, who is based in Gurugram. He has offices in Mum- bai and Bengaluru with around 700 employees. “We don’t have presence outside India yet, but we are capable of conducting verifications in more than 100 countries.”
AuthBridge started in 2005 when India had almost no infrastructure or ecosystem for employee background verification.It was somewhat limited to defence services and some other government institutions. AuthBridge was the first Indian company to lay the foundation of this industry pan- India and developed technology and automated operations. AuthBridge services over 1,500 leading compa- nies across the country in advanced background check and onboarding technology rooted in artificial intel- ligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). AuthBridge has delivery capabil- ity in 140 countries.
“Today, AuthBridge has evolved to be a tech company working in HRTech, FinTech and RegTech space offering products in onboarding, veri- fication and intelligence,” says Trehan an entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience. He has nurtured the organisation from a largely services- based to a highly tech-enabled busi- ness model. Today, AuthBridge delivers impact risk mitigation solutions to clients, including Fortune 500 organ- isations to name a few like AuthLead, WorkAttest, TruthScreen and Student Services Bureau.
Before becoming an entrepre- neur, Trehan worked with Shriram Industrial Enterprises (a part of the erstwhile DCM group) and then ICI India. His ability to recognise new business opportunities when mar- kets and technologies are in transi- tion also prompted him to co-author CoreBPO, a business process outsourc- ing company that specialised in pro- viding business process outsourcing to the global real estate industry.
Increase in revenue
In the BFSI sector, AuthBridge has empowered clients with contactless customer onboarding using technolo- gies like Video KYC, image recognition, face match and instant verification through government and proprietary databases. As per an estimate of Bain Consulting, retail banks can see a 20 per cent increase in revenue and a 30 per cent cut in costs through digitiza- tion and technology adoption. About 70 per cent of AuthBridge’s clients in this sector are expected to build digi- tal onboarding capabilities using their APIs and custom workflows.
“Our competitors are First Advan- tage, HireRight, Checkr, Onfido, Idfy, trulioo among others. While some of our competitors such as Onfido spe- cialises in identity verification only and others in background verification, we bring in the combination of both – specialisation of ID verification plus background verification on our tech platforms – TruthScreen and iBRIDGE – where background verification can be done through either of our products – StaffAssure, AuthLead or Digital KYC or can be done basis required checks. The combination of background verifi- cation expertise and tech enablement makes us stand out as compared to our competitors,” claims Trehan.
“We acquired one of our competi- tors, Footprints Collateral Services in 2018, which also marked the biggest acquisition in this space in India,” adds Trehan. Apart from a small round raised from friends and family, the company is bootstrapped. “Without disclosing numbers,” he says the com- pany is profitable. “Our revenue has increased by 125 per cent from FY17 to FY20, accompanied by a 5 times jump in check volumes.”
“As a technology partner, SysArc has consistently been able to rely on the AuthBridge team for a plethora of identity, address, and financial history services. In turn, the relationship sim- plified and streamlined our customers’ digital transformation journeys to a great extent. Their set of standard APIs could be seamlessly integrated into our platform for faster downstream checks and enhanced operational efficiencies for our customers,” says Govind Garg, senior VP, SysArc. “Next three years will be exciting.
A lot is changing around us and Fintech is evolving. The world has realised the importance of digitization and remote working, but the risks of frauds are still a reality,” says Trehan who is passionate about mentoring young entrepreneurs actively associated with NASSCOM and TiE, where he regularly speaks on subjects like innovation, process and business transformation, trust infrastructure etc.
Source: Business India
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