Mati

Legally verify users with a few lines of JS

4 followers

Legally verify users with a few lines of JS

4 followers

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Authentication & identity tools

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Compliance software

Mati is an ID verification tool that helps companies onboard their users with a layer of trust and security attached. Whether you’re a startup that has to perform KYC/AML checks on all users, or an established sharing-economy company that wants a higher level of safety and trust, you can now automate this process using our simple 10min integration.

Launch tags:Web App•User Experience•Fintech

Launch Team

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CryptoPoops

Hunter

I was so excited to meet Mati’s founders last week. As a user, I know the long “upload your ID” flows they replace, and as a maker, I’m inspired by what I could do in a weekend with even their free tier. Even though there's a lot of tech under the hood, I love the focus of making it beautiful, simple, and fast for both the makers and end-users. @filipvictor, can you talk about the origin story of Mati/the team's vision? And can you share some of the cool use cases you’ve seen from makers in the last year?

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8yr ago

Mati

Maker

@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!)

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8yr ago

CryptoPoops

Hunter

@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.

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8yr ago

Mati

Maker

@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)

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8yr ago

Very cool :) I work at Eaze (cannabis delivery) and verifying user IDs and age is an important part of our business, so I'm happy you're building this product! Question: if we were to integrate your verification button, how would we get the information for each user for our own systems?

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8yr ago

@O - AI coworker in Slack

Maker

@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 👨‍💻

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8yr ago

ShapeScale

Cool product! Curious how secure it is? You're handling pretty sensitive info... Just thinking about the large scale SSN leak of last year

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8yr ago

Mati

Maker

@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.

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8yr ago

@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.

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5yr ago

Congrats on this launch guys! I love this! It's so annoying to manually verify identities. Would you also verify identities in Europe?

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8yr ago

@O - AI coworker in Slack

Maker

@olivier_droz Yes we do very users from all Europe Olivier! Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email to schedule a demo! amaury@mati.io 🇪🇺

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8yr ago

@filipvictor - congrats on the PH! Can you talk about the tech behind the facial rec/biometric inputs?

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8yr ago

Mati

Maker

@colincarrier Thanks! Definitely! We started this project very much from the computer vision angle - actually I went to CES back in jan 2017 to show off my first build to smartphone companies like Xiaomi etc. I was still running around alone showing people my little prototype then :D What was very novel about what the technology then was the real time aspect of the algorithms, i.e. everything from face detection, facial landmarks (hundreds of points on your face), and ultimate verification was all running on pretty compute constrained ARM CPUs, and locally. Local compute contrasts to something like iPhone siri, which is running on servers and doesn’t work without good internet. It also meant, that if we got it right, we will have a good technological advantage over others and it will allow me to hire my friends who also liked mobile machine learning and computer vision engineering. The entire point from the beginning was to build something that works for all the phones, in all the countries, to displace all identity verification tech in use today (credit card mag stripe, fingerprint, email+pw, signature, manual verifications for KYC, gov checks, etc.). Of course they thought that was a little too ambitious but they were very interested specifically in what we were doing on visible light (unlike iPhone X infrared) locally-computed object recognition. All the computer vision that’s running is a combination of neural networks and traditional image processing very much optimized to ARM based processors (those tiny ones that go into phones vs intel or nvidia). There's a lot of details we could get in here about the specific libraries that need to be rewritten to enable heavy computer vision on mobile sorry ramble-y answer. Thought the makers might be curious about the back story @amaury_soviche want to add something?

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8yr ago

Cool! Sounds simliar to https://berbix.com. Do you offer API access that we can upload the ID photos to? Say if we want to own the UI/UX?

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8yr ago

@O - AI coworker in Slack

Maker

@kylealwyn We do not offer any API, because the ultimate goal of Mati is to build a network of verified users so that people can re-use their profile. That will make user verifications even more effective! But in order to build that network, we need to control the UI/UX and show our branding so that people trust our verification and say "oh it’s Mati verifying me, cool I know them already"

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8yr ago

ntwrk

Identity verification as a service is going to become increasingly important. Making it easy and affordable for nearly every app to do this is a huge win. Nice one.

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8yr ago

Mati

Maker

@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!

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8yr ago

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