How AuthBridge has been turning authentication into a core biz proposition

Pre-employment background screening and risk assessment company in the background verification domain, AuthBridge, which has its head office in Gurgaon, Haryana, is an enlisted background check company with National Skill Registry, an initiative of NASSCOM. Founded in the year 2005, AuthBridge is also a constituent member of APAC chapter of NAPBS (National Association of Profession Background Screeners). It is a provider of screening services to organisations for those employees who are already existing, senior management, prospective hires and partners and vendors under AuthBridge.

AuthBridge customers include start-ups, MNCs from extensive industry sectors. It has created automated web-based platforms, offering instant education and employee verification services that could be utilised by other background screening organisations and companies. It is currently expanding in other regions, targeting the global markets.

In conversation with Adgully, Ajay Trehan, Founder and CEO, AuthBridge, speaks at length about being in the authentication business, the solutions offered to a wide range of clients, the challenges faced in maintaining transparency, and much more.

What is the idea and concept behind AuthBridge?

We’ve been in the business for 18 years now. And we are the largest authentication company in the country. So basically, when I founded the company, my idea was to first solve the employee verification problem. Because in a lot of organisations, when they’re hiring people, there are a lot of challenges around verifying their identity, education, criminal record, employment history, etc. So, that was the first problem. I started working for 1,300 employees. Then of course, over a period of time, we started working with banks, etc., to help them solve the problem of verifiability. So, that’s what we do. We are the largest authentication and onboarding technology company in the country.

First division is the employee screening division The second division, which is the financial intelligence system, is our BFSI division, where we work with the banking and financial services and insurance sector to help them in detection, KYC, video KYC and those kinds of problems. The third division is Business Solutions, where we work with large corporations and help them do authentication, distributors, franchisees, etc.

Who is your primary TG and who are your competitors?

Our primary target group for the workforce and Business Solutions is Corporates. And for the BFSI or the Financial Intelligence vertical, our primary target group is banks, insurance companies, NBFCs, mutual funds and those kinds of entities.

How is AuthBridge helping to bring more transparency in  business operations and hiring processes?

That’s the whole core of the business. It just brings transparency because everything that is being stated by the candidate or by a vendor or by a distributor or by a customer gets verified. And sometimes customers also need some additional information about themselves, which also gets collected. So, the system, our processes or our technology automatically brings that comfort in the engagement.

If you look at it that way, we make doing business on the Internet easy and safe. For instance, if you are a food delivery company, we will keep your delivery boys clean. We will tell you if somebody has a criminal case that can impact your reputation in any way. Or if you are a cab aggregation company, we will tell you if your driver has a criminal case or has been involved in a motor vehicle accident, because if he’s a rash driver, that could impact your reputation later. We would help you not get into that trouble with the driver or with the delivery boy at all. So, it brings in a huge amount of convenience and ease of doing business.

How is verification different in HR as compared to in an e-commerce platform?

On the HR side or the employee side, the verifications require much more information. For example, you will do an education check, when you hire somebody for a particular job, you want to make sure that he’s skilled for that job, so you will do his education check.

When you hire people, you also ask them questions around their previous employment and what kind of experience they’ve had. So, you want to make sure that whatever experience they are mentioning about is genuine in nature. However, in the e-commerce side or in the cab gig economy side, what they want to know is typically identity and if the person has any criminal records, because of which their reputation could be at stake.

What are the challenges that AuthBridge has faced and how has it overcome them? How has been the pandemic period for your business?

The first challenge was around gathering data on individuals for us to be able to verify them. So, let’s say, if we were to verify you, we would need a copy of your degree, etc., which we’ll have to first collect from you, or you’ll have to give it to us, and then we’ll have to go to your university, where the degree was issued to confirm that the degree is genuine. Right now, doing that in a global operation is a very cumbersome process. So, we had to set up a lot of those processes to make sure that it happens smoothly across the world. That was the biggest challenge in the company.

We did that many years ago by automating a lot of our processes, by bringing in a lot of AI, and by bringing in a lot of robotic process automation of our processes.

When the pandemic struck, the challenge for us was to offer everything remotely and digitally to our customers. In the old days, we could always get in touch with a candidate and collect documents from his home, or when we were doing his or her address verification, we could send somebody down to his or her place to do a physical address verification. But, those things were not possible when the pandemic hit us. So, we had to convert a lot of our offerings to digital, and we had to also very quickly convince our customers to accept those digital offerings. Thankfully, that happened because our customers were also under a lot of pressure to still continue to be in the business despite the pandemic.

So, it was a challenging time, obviously on multiple grounds, but I think from a business standpoint, it worked out pretty well for us.

How is AuthBridge leveraging technology and AI to deliver best in class solutions?

We have been using artificial intelligence quite extensively in AuthBridge for many years. Just to give you an idea that the criminal records or litigation records in India are all in the public domain now, to collect that data from hundreds of websites in India and to aggregate that data and then search that data, is a very complex process. If you know how courts operate, if there is a judgment or there is an order issued by the court, the name of the party may be written in running text or maybe jumbled up and whatever. In case of orders and judgments that are being released on a daily basis, how do we make sure that we are able to read those judgments and order copy seamlessly without creating any problem, without slowing the process down for our customers? That’s where we have extensively used artificial intelligence.

The other area where we use AI quite a lot is document OCR and document reading. Our artificial intelligence engines can automatically look at a degree and say, for example, this is from Delhi University, and this person has done his or her BCom in this year. Similarly, our AI engines can quickly read text and convert and identify the name of the individual against which there is that order, or who the other parties are, etc.

Our AI engines can also create final reports based on our findings on the data. So, a lot of that training of AI that is required to do this has been done in-house. We have a pretty strong data and AI team in AuthBridge.

What are the trends in the HR industry currently, according to you?

I see that the adoption of digital ways of doing things has really increased in the last 3-4 years, which was not the case earlier. Second, the hunger of the HR community to learn newer technologies and how those technologies can be used to improve their processes is quite commendable. That wasn’t the case earlier. I think these are the two primary things where I see a significant shift that’s really helping companies like us, which are largely technology companies, to serve the HR fraternity better.

What are the plans and future vision of AuthBridge? How many verifications have been done by the company till date?

First, on a daily basis we do, maybe on an extreme day, probably half a million verifications. That’s about 5 lakh verifications a day, which comes to about 15-20 million verifications in a month. And a lot of that is happening robotically and automatically with very little manual intervention from our side.

When it comes to the future, actually the sky’s the limit, if I may say so. We are already doing business in close to about 54 countries and we are beginning to grow globally. The global revenues are growing.

So that’s a very positive sign for us, considering that we are a India-based company. So, it has been a fairly exciting thing.