Multibillion-Dollar Investment Firm Betterment Says ‘Yes’ to More Good Customers Instantly with Socure’s Graph-Defined Identity Verification

Betterment taps Socure to unlock frictionless customer experience and boost auto-approvals by 30%. Helps company achieve mission of empowering people to do what’s best for their money so they can live better.

Industry: Investing
Headquarters: New York
Socure ID+ Products: Sigma Identity Fraud,
Socure KYC, Predictive DocV with Liveness,
Email RiskScore, Phone RiskScore, Address
RiskScore, Global Watchlist Screening with
Monitoring, Alert List

Betterment is the largest independent digital
investment advisor, offering investing and
etirement solutions alongside its
everyday services for spending and
saving. Since 2010, Betterment has had
one mission: to make people’s lives better
with easy-to-use, personalized investment
solutions. Using cutting-edge technology,
they empower hundreds of thousands
of customers to manage their money
— for today, tomorrow, and someday —
with expert advice; automated money
management tools; and tax-smart strategies
that help keep taxes low.

Delivering on its goal to make investing more accessible
and easier for all people requires Betterment to provide
a seamless customer onboarding experience. As online
fraud activity continues to rise, Betterment partnered
with Socure to improve the customer approval process
to run fraud checks and verify identities faster, all with
greater accuracy than ever before. The result was
less fraud and accelerated onboarding for legitimate
customers, leading to additional scale and growth.

“Frictionless identity verification at onboarding is crucial for business growth
and protecting our customers,” said Betterment Director of Operations Mark
Kassardjian. “Betterment has grown a lot over the last five years. Our old system
involved a ton of manual work and wasn’t scaling with that growth. We were seeing
a number of customer prospects come in the door but then drop off because they
encountered minor friction.”

Company growth goals, a fast-changing fraud landscape, and a hyper-focus to
deliver on its mission; with these things in mind, Betterment sought a way to
quickly and accurately identify good customers, while providing a frictionless and
user-friendly onboarding experience. That’s why they turned to Socure’s industry-leading identity verification and fraud prediction platform. With Socure, Betterment
achieved a 30% increase in auto-approvals, a dramatic reduction in manual review
rates, and more streamlined onboarding to enable accelerated, scalable growth.

CHALLENGES

• Increasing manual review rates that took up an inordinate
amount of employee time and company resources

KEY RESULTS

• Drop off for “good” customers encountering friction
• Onboarding friction caused by slow manual checks
and systems
• Auto-approval rates improved by 30%
• Lack of machine learning with legacy systems and vendors
that don’t automatically scale to combat emerging patterns
and upticks in fraudulent activity
• Reduced onboarding time as “good” customers benefited
from automated accuracy
• Holistic view of identity based on proprietary and redundant
data sets combined with graph analytics and machine learning
• Reduced fraud through fast, hyper-accurate checks and risk
scoring to ensure accurate identity verification
• Sophisticated, scalable onboarding checks through fully automated step-up document verification with predictive risk
scoring to handle limitless growth

A Partner Who Understands Fraud — and Business Success

Betterment was looking for a trusted partner, one known for deploying market-leading identity verification and fraud prediction
solutions as a pathway to better business outcomes. A cross-functional group of internal Betterment experts started their search
by reaching out to the biggest names in the industry. From the outset, they knew they could not simply add yet another rules-based point solution to their existing stack. Betterment wanted to use an ML-driven platform and layered approach for identity
verification to more seamlessly onboard new customers, with the highest degree of accuracy.

The Betterment team was determined to hold their new partner to the same high standards of seamless user experience,
accuracy, and quality that characterizes Betterment’s offering itself, and Socure delivered.

From Friction to Seamless Automation

The key to solving for Betterment’s goal — faster, automated, and scalable onboarding of every good customer — was rooted
in Socure’s identity graph and machine learning capabilities, which are designed to persistently process, analyze, and correlate
every facet of a digital identity, utilizing over 17,000 features, redundant data sources, and a consortium network of over 1,700
customers to deliver the highest-assurance assessments of new users in the market.

“Socure was the only vendor we took to the proof-of-concept stage,” said Kassardjian. “After testing, we believed there would
be a substantial improvement in lift when we went live, and we were proven right. We launched the Sigma Identity Fraud and
RiskScores solutions in September 2020, followed by Predictive DocV in April 2021. We haven’t looked back since.”

Socure exceeded Betterment’s expectations by providing a holistic view of the risk of an identity, with Sigma Identity Fraud,
Socure KYC, Email RiskScore, Phone RiskScore, and Address RiskScore. “Socure’s correlated, focused checks proved extremely
valuable,” said Kassardjian. “Getting that high level of identity coverage and incorporating consortium feedback from such broad
industries has been hugely beneficial to our overall risk strategy.”

Socure’s KYC solution also proved instrumental in driving new customer revenue with unrivaled accuracy and population coverage,
enabling auto-approval of more good customers, while fully satisfying compliance requirements. Patented AI/ML-driven identity
clustering and resolution capabilities helped Betterment take advantage of the highest match rates accuracy in the industry,
including auto-approval of more Gen Z, Millennial, and thin-file consumers, who are foundational to Betterment’s growth strategy.

Additionally, with Socure’s Predictive DocV solution, the Betterment team was able to leave manual reviews behind by taking
advantage of automated machine learning and deep forensic analysis to verify the authenticity of ID documents. Predictive DocV’s
computer vision technology, in particular, looks for ultra-fine details beyond the limitations of the human eye, such as optically

“

The Predictive DocV solution
has been a tremendous boon
for productivity and enabled
more efficient resource
allocation. We saw our
approval rate improve by 30%.
We’ve driven down rejection
rates considerably while
simultaneously keeping out
more applications that would
increase the amount of fraud
we encounter.

Mark Kassardjian
Director of Operations,
Betterment

verifiable ink, text overlays, subtle hue changes, and watermarks, along with cross-document data consistency, signs of manipulation or forgery, and overall document
quality. The easy-to-use guided image capture app and enhanced biometric facial
matching enables hyper-accurate selfie-to-ID photo comparison and returns a
response within seconds.

“The Predictive DocV solution has been a tremendous boon for productivity and
enabled more efficient resource allocation,” said Kassardjian. “We saw our approval
rate improve by 30%. We’ve driven down rejection rates considerably while
simultaneously keeping out more applications that would increase the amount
of fraud we encounter.”

Accurate Verification for Rapid Customer Growth

Once Socure was deployed, Betterment’s onboarding quickly transitioned from
manual-heavy processes to automated customer assessments based on an identity
graph powered by eight billion rows of data and an ever-growing network database
of 800 million known good and bad identities. For Betterment, that meant that
decision-making could now be handled by an adaptive and continuous feedback
loop that gets smarter through machine learning and analytics.

“Initially, it was a challenge just to define the fraud indicators that could aid us in
identifying emerging attack patterns, especially as fraudsters were acquiring more
sophisticated tools and technology,” said Kassardjian.

“We saw the sophisticated and highly-predictive indicators that Socure was
employing, like name-to-phone correlation, name-to-email correlation, name-to-address correlation, IP-to-geolocation tracking, and distinguishing an actual
IP address from a proxy,” said Kassardjian. “Those examples have served as an
indicator of whether an applicant is legitimate, or an instance of potential identity
theft. Just knowing that we are decisioning on some of the most powerful ML signals
available allows me to sleep better at night,” said Kassardjian.

With Socure, Betterment has been able to swiftly onboard legitimate customers
while preventing identity theft, resulting in an expanded user base and a healthier
bottom line. As Betterment continues to grow and fraudsters continue to evolve,
Kassardjian expects to implement even more Socure solutions in order to scale
and meet its strategic business goals.

About Socure

Socure is the leading platform for digital identity verification and trust. Its predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine
learning techniques with trusted online/offline data intelligence from physical government-issued documents as well as email, phone, address, IP,
device, velocity, date of birth, SSN, and the broader internet to verify identities in real time. The company has more than 1,700 customers across
the financial services, government, gaming, healthcare, telecom, and e-commerce industries, including four of the top five banks, 13 of the top
15 card issuers, the top three MSBs, the top payroll provider, the top credit bureau, the top online gaming operator, the top Buy Now, Pay Later
(BNPL) providers, and over 250 of the largest fintechs. Marquee customers include Chime, SoFi, Robinhood, Gusto, Public, Stash, DraftKings, State of
California, and Florida’s Homeowner Assistance Fund. Socure customers have become investors in the company including Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo
Strategic Capital, Capital One Ventures, MVB Bank, and Synchrony. Additional investors include Accel, T. Rowe Price, Bain Capital Ventures, Tiger
Global, Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Sorenson, Flint Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, and others.