Three Minutes and You’re In Business! Socure Helps Lili Deliver Financial Services on Demand for the New Economy

Socure helps us onboard new customers quickly and scale faster than we could with other tools. The Socure solutions provide a unified, comprehensive view of a digital identity, not just on document authenticity and selfie matching, but for actual identity and risk-based decisions. We identified no other solutions that compared in terms of accuracy or insights.”

– John Mearls, Head of Risk & Operations, Lili

Lili promises its customers, “three minutes and you’re in business!” With its rapid and easy registration process, Lili gives freelancers and small business owners a lightning-fast path to a comprehensive set of banking, tax management, and accounting tools to improve their bottom line. To deliver on this three-minute registration promise, Lili makes customer onboarding more than a top priority; it is the essence of its business model.

Banking for a New Economy

As the world shifted during the pandemic, consumers changed how they purchased goods and services. The increase in demand for delivery services, pay-as-you-go transportation, and remote work fueled the growth of the freelance job market, and Lili’s product offerings were essential for individuals transitioning into this new economy. These workers tend to come from younger populations, including Gen Z, Millennials, and other groups with thin or non-existent credit histories, making them hard to verify and often preventing credit-worthy customers from getting the financial services they need. Lili had an opportunity to benefit from the surging freelance economy and needed to align with a partner that could help them address the challenge of inclusivity while delivering a seamless customer experience.

“Freelancers are especially tech-savvy and most of their work is sourced through online portfolios and digital marketplaces,“ explained John Mearls, Head of Risk and Operations at Lili. “With heavy digital use comes high expectations for a flawless user experience.” So while Lili’s conversion rates were important, frictionless onboarding that aligned with Lili’s customer-centric approach and risk appetite was make-or-break for its success. As a result, Lili’s number one priority was to partner with an identity verification and fraud solution provider that could support its rapid growth expectations, without adversely affecting the customer onboarding experience.

Identity Verification—Getting it Right at Onboarding

For Lili, as for all digital businesses, a seamless customer experience starts with onboarding, which the company promises can be completed in three minutes.

“It all starts with the onboarding process,” said Mearls. “We wanted to provide a smooth and frictionless onboarding experience for the customer, but we also had to minimize fraud and risk by only onboarding people who are who they say they are. We knew through initial testing and empirical data that Socure provided both.”

Lili’s customers live online, source work online, and are paid online; they know what a good digital experience looks like and are not willing to settle for less. They also want to work with companies that can provide a trusted, safe environment, which is what drove Lili to build its service in the first place.

With the stakes high to get both identity verification and fraud prevention right at onboarding, the company put its trust in Socure’s industry-leading identity verification platform.

Accuracy and Automation to Deliver Impact

Lili saw especially impactful results using Socure KYC for identity verification and onboarding automation, Predictive DocV for automated, hyper-accurate step-up authentication, and Sigma Identity Fraud and Sigma Synthetic Fraud to capture more fraud while reducing false positives. With the Socure solutions in place, Lili evolved beyond the limitations of legacy KYC/CIP and disjointed point solutions, unlocking a new competitive edge in customer auto-approvals, conversion, and growth.

“It’s incredibly helpful to have a computer vision-driven ID document verification solution with layered risk assessment so we aren’t relying on our Compliance and Risk teams to manually review and decide whether someone has grown a beard since their last driver’s license photo,” said Mearls. “This frees up our time and resources, and delivers much more accurate results than any other method of ID verification we tested.”

What Happened Next?

How did Socure’s graph-defined, analytics-first solution hold up when faced with the evolving ecosystem of freelancers? Download the full case study to learn how Lili was able to increase auto-approvals by 13% while reducing drop-off and unlocking unprecedented growth.