Concept: Bahamas crypto exchange FTX has partnered with American fintech company Stripe to enable online onboarding and identity verification for users seeking to join the exchange. With Stripe Identity, an ML-powered online identity verification tool, FTX can eliminate the need for time-consuming manual reviews in real-time.

Nature of Disruption: Stripe Identity allows users to verify identities of users in minutes with no code required. Alternatively, fraud and risk teams can produce verification links without using any code to examine suspicious transactions or high-risk users. To verify the identity, users can click a live selfie and a photo of their government ID. Stripe’s ML feature then matches the ID to the selfie. As the data is encrypted and sent directly to Stripe, an individual business does not have to worry about handling sensitive, personal data on its infrastructure. Stripe can also allow FTX users to purchase cryptocurrencies via debit cards and bank-issued Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions. Additionally, FTX can use Stripe Radar to reduce fraud risk. The solution leverages ML models and signals such as customer details and billing information to determine fraudsters.

Outlook: Friction in onboarding leads to loss of customers and involves high cost. For identity verification, customers at FTX used to take selfies and upload images of documents. Failures delayed the process, arising a need for manual review by FTX’s compliance team, and consuming up to a week. With Stripe Identity, FTX can verify the identity of users in real-time, reduce fraud, and eliminate its operational burden. Stripe Payments, when used in combination with Stripe Radar, allows FTX to leverage Stripe’s ML model, which streamlines payments based on data from millions of businesses. FTX can improve its customer experience by decreasing unnecessary declines by leveraging sophisticated payment intelligence.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk