Mati

@staringispolite thanks for hunting us! I started mati 2 years ago because I became fascinated with the concept of identity, how its underlying infrastructure still has not moved online - and what we can enable once we port it online. I was an immigrant as a kid, from Poland to England, and finally the US, and I’ve had problems doing simple things like signing apartment leases, obtaining a credit card, or even renting a car at the airport. I realized that these "identity issues" are not unique to immigrants and are widespread even in highly developed countries like the US. 50% in the US alone are shut out of mainstream banking due to thin credit file or incorrectly represented credit worthiness. This reaches 90% in the developing world. We decided to tackle account opening first - bank account opening, buying cryptocurrency, signing up to work for uber, hosting people on airbnb, or asking a new fintech for a loan. All those situations require an ID verification step, which is often super frustrating to do for users, and very costly for companies. Mati makes it 5-10x cheaper, takes 10 minutes to integrate as a maker, and we believe is the fastest and easiest user experience in the space. As for use cases, some of my favorites are a client that gives out loans to people who “don’t exist” in the credit bureaus and a bus startup that verifies your fellow passengers like ride-share does drivers. In places like Mexico, even regular e-commerce companies use mati, because otherwise, fraud would put them out of business. We opened an office in LatAm for this reason - a lot of normal services we take for granted, like car sharing, or coworking, are very difficult to get off the ground elsewhere in the world. I’m super excited to see what the PH community will do with this tool. That’s why we give away 1,000 verifications/month in our free tier, to really see what people will do when integrating trust/verification is so quick & inexpensive that it even makes sense for a weekend project. (If you have ideas or build something, let me know here or on twitter!)

@filipvictor The overnight bus example is one that stuck with me. If I'm sleeping around complete strangers, I'd totally want them to be verified the way ride-share drivers or other sharing economy people are. I guess I'd just never thought that could scale, so I never thought of it as a possible feature? That's what really got me thinking what else can be possible now that apps can integrate this stuff 10x more cheaply/quickly? You mentioned the developing world, and I think entire new product categories as well.

@staringispolite absolutely! If you think about companies like airbnb or uber, they require a lot of implied trust, which these companies usually build for years before their service takes off - and only in developed, relatively safe places. Most places just don’t have the trust built in by default like SF does. With a "trust plugin" like mati, you can build something completely new that wasn’t possible before. We heard so many ideas in the past year, but here’s a few i remember from our latam office: - real user tinder - airbnb for food, in people’s houses - no commission craigslist for p2p services - product barter - i.e. an exchange platform - p2p rental platform to make money on stuff like bikes and projectors laying around - uber for children (i guess instead of calling a cab for children to go to school or airport)

@toniena_ thank you!! we actually launched in ecommerce for that reason. We even opened an office in Mexico because of that - they have the highest online e-commerce fraud in the world so we thought if we can prove out our product there, it will work anywhere. The plan is to make verifying yourself online as simple as login with facebook. Then we can give it out to everyone, drop the price, and see if we can help help with fraud and help makers create digital services that build communities with built-in trust.

@filipvictor that makes sense! I think it would certainly improve people's experience online. We need more companies like yours with a big vision for what the internet can become :) Good luck!

@hanyoon indeed Han, at Mati we live and breathe to make 100% 'Chief Compliance Officers’ happy 😃

@alexwayen Hey! I guess you're referring to credit agency breach, which was caused by the outdated software in their stack. Let's hope that it's been a good lesson to others at least. We are building the service with all these bad examples in mind and doing our best to achieve the maximum possible security by continuously keeping up to date our software stack, putting effort in checking regularly for new vulnerabilities and ways of fixing them, strengthening our infrastructure with firewalls, intrusion detection systems, etc. The sensitive info itself is stored in an encrypted format, where we only use well tested standards-based crypto-algorithms. It will even become more secure in the upcoming updates, when we provide a complete TNO (trust no-one) model over the user's sensitive data. At that point even we at Mati won't be able to decrypt the data, it will be accessible only to the user and the entities it shares the data with.

@alexwayen @evoyan would be nice to document a feature that is based as well on standard cryptography as the certified timestamps (RFC3161) in a way that your clients and support personnel are confused about simply what are you certifying. And make that documentation public. Good cryptography does not depend on hiding what is intended to be certified by public interest entities requiring this.

@nico_berg Very much appreciated Nico! Indeed identity verification is needed is many verticals!

@nico_berg thank you! Looking forward to see you guys launch on PH soon

@nhong Nick, indeed your use case is very interested. The weed industry has very little identity verification standard and most companies handle that manually. Which usually leads to operational disaster 🌿 To answer your second question, once a user finishes the Mati verification flow, we verify that the user is the one he says he is, and then send all the verification information directly to your backend 👨‍💻

@joshuapinter thanks! We want to help small pre-startups form good ideas and get concepts out the door. We're organizing hackathons. Can't wait to see what comes out of that!