Groceries, transportation, relationships, entertainment, and more are all now available at the swipe of a smartphone. Buyers have come to not only enjoy — but expect — frictionless interactions that provide instant gratification. Fast response times are no longer a perk; they’re the most important attribute of the customer experience. 

But an increasingly digital, geographically dispersed, and faster world makes it more difficult than ever to know who you’re doing business with — leaving companies uncertain about which potential customers are trustworthy. And their fears are justified: New research shows that the average U.S. fintech loses $51M to fraud annually, and the impact of fraud has a negative ripple effect across the entire company.

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Digital trust is broken — but we can work to fix it

In response to this uncertainty, businesses have asked potential customers to submit more and more information about themselves during the application process: where they live, how much they earn, proof of business ownership, credit history, and more. They often also ask for documentation (such as bank statements, utility bills, W2s, etc.). Hundreds of hours each week are then spent manually reviewing those documents to determine whether the information provided by a potential customer is legitimate. All of this creates friction for consumers, who can easily leave for a competitive offering. 

Assessing the trustworthiness of potential customers has now become … 

• Manual: Overwhelmed with document reviews and struggle to support a growing business without increasing risk.
• Subjective: Reliant on educated guesses to identify manipulated documents, leaving their business open to fraud and credit losses.
• Painful: Customers are forced wait hours, days, or even weeks to access financial products. 

And the stakes are very high: Without a clear understanding of how to identify trustworthy and creditworthy customers, financial institutions may be defrauded by cybercriminals or reject worthy applicants (resulting in millions of unbanked, “thin file,” and credit invisible consumers).

The best risk teams are armed with experience and intuition. When something isn’t right, they can sense it. But uncertainty has become a plague for them. While an online approach has given companies access to more data than ever, they struggle to uncover the insights needed to assess risk and build digital trust. 

But a world powered by digital trust is possible. 

We set out to help solve the uncertainty faced by risk teams everywhere by building artificial intelligence based on the heuristics used by manual review teams. So for the first time ever, they can build digital trust by quickly analyzing billions of data points with a high degree of accuracy and uncovering insights that were previously invisible to the human eye. 

Technologies that make what’s invisible, visible (like the telescope, the microscope, the x-ray) have always moved society forward in very powerful and important ways. 

We got our first glimpse of the potential for this technology when leading fintech brands like Navan, Ramp, and Bluevine adopted our solution and immediately shared the ROI from reduced fraud losses. And they wanted to see more. Can we reliably automate other parts of the manual review process like analyzing creditworthiness? What other data inputs can we check to ensure legitimacy? And will we make it easier for consumers to safely submit sensitive financial information and documents? 

With AI, the answer is yes. And it’s only the beginning.  

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Welcome to the era of Risk Intelligence

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According to Deloitte, 79% of financial institutions said that enhancing the quality, availability, and timeliness of risk data was a top priority even prior to the pandemic. Risk leaders, like cybersecurity professionals, want to enable their businesses to grow responsibly. They are looking to eliminate uncertainty about their potential customers. 

So we’re making a bold leap in 2023 to introduce Risk Intelligence, a powerful new way for risk teams to identify fraudulent/legitimate and risky/creditworthy customers. Instead of relying on tedious, subjective, and error-prone manual reviews, teams that use Risk Intelligence software are equipped with AI-powered fraud and credit insights that eliminate uncertainty and make risk decisions easier. This allows them to effectively build digital trust and, ultimately, approve more customers with confidence.

We started empowering teams with Risk Intelligence by building best-in-class document fraud detection so fintechs and financial institutions could accurately analyze the legitimacy and credibility of documents supplied by applicants. Then we saw companies throughout financial services adopting our solution to determine the trustworthiness of the people they do business with as well. General Services Corporation (GSC), a leading provider of apartment homes and apartment management services, purchased Inscribe to build digital trust with tenants and has been able to effectively mitigate evictions.  

Now, we’ve raised $25M in Series B funding to expand the breadth of our fraud detection capabilities, as well as introduce state-of-the-art Risk Intelligence innovations. We’re incredibly excited to hit this important milestone. Our round was led by Threshold Ventures and joined by Crosslink Capital, Foundry, and Uncork Capital. They were also joined by Forum Ventures, as well as angel investors including Box co-founder Dylan Smith, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, Irish entrepreneur Mark Cummins, and Figma VP Sales Kyle Parrish, bringing our total amount raised to $38M.

We believe that knowledge is power. So we’re also embarking on an initiative to empower the entire financial services industry with Risk Intelligence by regularly surfacing fraud trends and data. Register for our webinar next week, “From intuition to intelligence — fraud trends every risk leader must know for 2023,” to learn more.  

All this comes on the heels of seeing a 3x year-over-year increase in ARR and a 4x year-over-year increase in monthly usage in 2022, as well as being listed on the 2022 AIFintech100 and SaaS award lists. 

We’ve already made major strides in helping companies build trust and provide fast response times, but there is still so much more to come. Our team is energized every day at the possibility of creating accurate and innovative solutions to uncover critical Risk Intelligence that can help companies grow responsibly. Because when we eliminate uncertainty, companies can approve more customers with confidence.

Cheers, 

Ronan, Conor, and your friends at Inscribe