As more business than ever is conducted online, identity verification has become key as companies look to prevent the rising tide of identity fraud. Onfido allows businesses to verify a user’s identity automatically using AI to verify uploaded identity documents against a range of biometric markers and online footprint metrics.

As a disruptor in a field sorely needing innovation, Onfido has built a commanding market lead. However it now faces increased competition from the likes of Stripe, Persona and IDNow. Onfido has maintained its market lead through strong, focused R&D, winning it multiple awards including the CogX Best AI product in FinTech for 2022.

Onfido has seen a staggering growth in revenue over the past few years and its customers include the likes of President's Choice Financial, Revolut and Deliveroo. Having raised a large amount of investment funding and achieved sustained profitability, it has now been acquired by Entrust, a leader in payments, identities, and data security. This new chapter for Onfido will open its services up to Entrust's large customer base, a mutually beneficial move.

Onfido has emerged as a leader in the field of digital identity. The company has grown exponentially due to its partnership sales model and as of October 2020 can verify more than 4,600 document types from 195 countries.

The core technology matches photo IDs with live facial recognition data, and can be used to verify gig-economy workers; as part of a financial services KYC onboarding process; or as part of a transaction verification step.

After completing a $100m Series D financing in April 2020 led by TPG Growth, the company announced a leadership transition by appointing Mick Tuchen who most recently served as CEO of cloud integration firm Talend, which he took public in 2016.

Its founder and former CEO Husayn Kassai, was named by Forbes in its ’30 under 30 list’ having started the company straight after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford University. He remains as an advisor, while he no doubt plots his next entrepreneurial adventure.

Such leadership transitions are not unusual in extremely high growth situations, where the need for experience is paramount in avoiding mis-steps on the path to market leadership. While Onfido’s growth and partnership list is impressive, the horizontal positioning of the company as an international digital ID standard is demanding, and will require a price competitive offering while maintaining aggressive partnership rollout activities.

The application of AI within the product will enable the technology to improve as its data set and experience grows – but growth needs to stay accelerating for the company to maintain its leadership position.