Verify and Validate User Identities With Trolley’s New IDV Tool

Learn about Trolley’s new ID verification tool, why we built it, how to turn it on, and why you’ll want it as part of your onboarding processes in no time.

The internet economy is growing quickly, and platforms of all types are adding new users (vendors, sellers, freelancers, artists… you name it) every day. 

Having the tools and processes in place to onboard and pay new users in a seamless way is essential to keeping up with that pace. Your responsibility to Know Your Customer (KYC) also needs to stay on pace, or you can end up in a place where you are either:

1. bogged down by manual identity verification processes, or
2. missing KYC checks, and opening yourself up to risk.

The team at Trolley doesn’t like “manual” or “risk,” so we’re stepping up with an alternative solution.

Introducing Trolley IDV, our latest tool that uses live, multi-step ID verification technology to validate the identity of your users, letting you better trust new signups and move forward with your growth.

Keep reading to learn more.

Why trust tools are essential for modern platforms

Simply put, there’s a lot of money moving around on the internet. In 2023, 17.3 billion dollars of online retail sales transactions occur every day.

More and more, these transactions are happening through marketplaces/platforms where a buyer transacts with a seller of a good or service. This means that sellers from around the world are seeing new opportunities to earn and take part of that pie.

However, not all sellers are equally as entitled to participate. There are regulations in place to combat financial fraud, money laundering, and funding terrorism.

These rules require marketplaces to Know Your Customer (KYC). This requires the platform to learn about a user’s identity, banking info, type of business activities and other identifying info, and compare it to global screening lists before moving funds.

This doesn’t stop bad actors from acting badly, so actions that use a legitimate ID to carry out illegitimate activities—like identity fraud and account takeovers—are becoming more and more common.

Global governments have also taken notice of this trend and are putting laws in place that mandate online platforms take an active role in knowing their customers. 

As of writing this article, there are two laws in particular that we’re watching:

• In the USA, the INFORM Consumers Act (INFORM) went into effect on June 27, 2023,
• In the EU, the Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force on November 16, 2022.

INFORM requires online marketplaces to collect bank account information, contact information, and a Tax ID number from high-volume third party sellers. Additionally, online marketplaces must verify the information they get from high-volume third party sellers and certify it as accurate at least once a year.

The DSA asks marketplaces based in the EU to conduct similar credential vetting of third party suppliers plus some additional obligations that include compliance by design and random checks.

Our latest feature: Identity Verification (IDV)

Until now, marketplaces and their teams needed to maintain a tech stack alongside manual processes to collect, verify, validate, screen, and communicate the KYC processes.

To make life as easy as possible, Trolley has taken all of the processes above, and integrated them directly into our existing platform as our IDV tool.

Now in a single product that already consolidates onboarding workflows, payouts, ERP syncing, and EoY tax filing, Trolley now also offers product & compliance teams a robust and secure onboarding process, the tools needed to collect and verify identity documents, and a dashboard to manage fraud risk.

Verifying identity and maintaining audit logs ultimately helps in establishing trust between your platform, your recipients, and your users. Our objective is to let you step back from manual compliance checks with the peace of mind of knowing your platform is fighting fraud on auto-pilot. 

Trolley IDV has built in:

• Identity & document verification: Collect and validate IDs versus 11,000 official government ID templates from over 200 countries.
• Live photo validation: Use the power of image recognition to ensure the uploaded ID is from the actual person submitting it.
• Proof of address and age comparisons: Verify details provided during onboarding, such as address and DOB, with the ID document.
• Monitoring dashboards: Manage the KYC and IDV process from a single screen where you are alerted to actions you may need to take.

Wondering how to enable IDV in Trolley? Our Help Center takes you through the steps. And if you’re looking for more info, check out our IDV FAQs.

Trust in Trolley to manage your recipient onboarding and IDV

The KYC process is important to keep the internet economy safe for everyone involved, and removing the friction that might be stopping you from implementing an ideal IDV process is critical for us. We want you to rely on us to help you build trust in your recipients.

As you evaluate the solutions in the market, make sure to spend time looking at how well the option fits with your existing workflows, your existing tech stack, and how much overhead it adds to your processes. We’re pretty confident that our all-in-one onboarding, payouts, sync, tax, and now, IDV solution will provide you the most seamless experience available today.

If you’d like to learn more about adding Trolley Trust or our IDV tool, see our Trust page. If you have questions about functionality or pricing, please reach out to us.