Dialectica leverages Persona’s flexible identity platform to accelerate expert verification and quality assurance
See how Dialectica partners with Persona to integrate identity verification, scaling its expert onboarding process to support global growth while maintaining quality
Before making critical investment or business decisions, such as launching a new product, breaking into a new market, or making an acquisition, Dialectica’s clients need a solid understanding of the factors influencing that decision. When investors, consultants, or corporations lack the internal expertise to answer complex or technical questions, they often look outside the organization for help. This often involves paying an outside firm for market research or bringing on outside experts as consultants.
Dialectica helps its clients — including top consulting firms, leading investment firms, and Fortune 500 companies — make critical business decisions by providing them with valuable market intelligence, insights, and reports. This intelligence is facilitated by Dialectica’s global expert network platform, which connects clients with experts through Dialectica’s services or delivers insights directly through Dialectica’s content.
Clients using the platform gain quick access to valuable insights they can use to inform their corporate and investment strategy, while experts can join an active community of professionals and earn fees for sharing their unique insights.
Problem: Dialectica needed a reliable tool to augment and automate its expert vetting process to maintain quality and efficiency in the face of exponential network growth
Unfortunately, just because a person claims to be an expert doesn’t mean it’s true. Expert fraud, when a person invents, misrepresents, or exaggerates their expertise, has been a problem for years. And it’s only become more of a problem thanks to AI tools that make it easier than ever to create fake profiles and even entire websites with the goal of faking expertise and identity.
To preserve client trust and provide real value to its clients, Dialectica needed to be able to verify that the experts it sources and adds to its network are legitimate. At a baseline, this meant being able to screen experts against very specific data sources for local regions. It also meant being able to step up its identity verification (IDV) process and apply it across all client accounts and all product and service lines.
“Our business is built on trust,” says Jason Howard, chief legal and regulatory officer at Dialectica. “Before we put an expert in touch with our clients, we need to know as much relevant information about them as possible.”
In the past, this meant manually vetting each expert before connecting them to a client: reviewing their LinkedIn profile, conducting a screening call, asking questions, and looking for inconsistencies that might point to fraud. While Dialectica still uses this process, it is mostly manual, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale. Dialectica’s clients need credible expert insights as fast as possible to stay ahead. A delay could mean that Dialectica forfeits a valuable lead to a competitor or that its clients miss critical information valuable to their decision-making.
“Our clients are doing projects that are very high impact and time sensitive,” says Jason. “As soon as they identify an expert they want to speak with, they want to be on the phone with that expert almost immediately. Having to go through manual processes is a real limiting factor.”
To grow its platform, meet client expectations with regard to speed, and continue providing real value to its customers, Dialectica needed the ability to vet more experts as quickly as possible. And to do that, it needed an automated solution.
Our business is built on trust. Before we put an expert in touch with our clients, we need to know as much relevant information about them as possible.
Solution: Dialectica leverages Persona’s identity platform to rapidly verify experts across its products and services, enhancing security and ensuring client peace of mind
As it evaluated potential solutions, Dialectica knew that whatever platform it chose would need to be easy to use, offer global coverage, and be capable of verifying experts as quickly as possible. With the option to automate parts of the process, Persona checked all of these boxes right out of the gate.
Other reasons Dialectica ultimately chose to partner with Persona include:
Configurability
Dialectica’s ideal solution was one that allowed it to maintain full control over how and when it verified its experts.
“For Dialectica, our goal is to eventually have 100% of our network identity verified,” says Jason. “In the meantime, with the help of Persona, we have embedded IDV into our workflows to immediately meet the needs of clients who want to ensure that 100% of the experts they speak with are identity verified by the time they get on a call with them."
The flexibility of Persona’s platform means that Dialectica can tailor the vetting process according to its own quality requirements and risk assessment, while also accommodating unique needs of individual clients.
For some clients and experts, that might involve a base layer of sanctions/watchlist, PEP, and adverse media screening. For others, it might involve step-up identity checks that leverage government ID verification or selfie verification.
Many of our experts have already interacted with Persona for verification in the past. That makes Persona a known commodity. There’s already a level of trust that makes experts more likely to agree to being verified.
Friction control
Dialectica needed the expert verification process to be smooth. Too much friction would make it difficult to meet client demands and continue to grow its network.
“Anytime you require an expert to complete an additional step, like identity verification, there is a risk they might drop out, especially if the process isn’t smooth,” says Jason. “That could cause us to lose experts, and we of course want to avoid that as much as possible.”
Persona’s customizability proved a real asset in this regard, allowing Dialectica to fine-tune its verification process to remove as much friction as possible.
At the same time, Dialectica also wanted a solution that would allow it to tailor the verification flow's design, branding, and language to present a unified experience for experts. Here, again, Persona’s customization options played an integral role.
“Whatever solution we chose, it needed to be the least disruptive possible in terms of the user experience,” says Emmanuelle Kozma, project manager for Dialectica's compliance operations, data, and enablement team. “We didn’t want something that felt generic or static. We wanted something that felt like it was a part of the Dialectica onboarding flow that was already in place. That was important not only from a psychological perspective, but from a consistency perspective, and it was an important piece that Persona was able to accommodate for us.”
Another way Jason says Persona reduces friction for Dialectica is the fact that it’s an established and recognized brand. Many experts are already familiar with what Persona is and how it works, reducing the likelihood that they’ll balk when asked to verify.
“Many of our experts have already interacted with Persona for verification in the past,” says Jason. “That makes Persona a known commodity. There’s already a level of trust that makes experts more likely to agree to being verified.”
Close partnership
When evaluating its options, Dialectica was looking for a solution that understood its business and treated it like an equal rather than a customer. To that end, the company has been pleased with Persona’s approach.
“It’s been a very collaborative relationship,” says Jason. “There’s been a lot of care on both sides to make sure that this isn’t a transactional thing; it’s a partnership.”
If and when Dialectica has questions about product capabilities or features, they can ask via Slack for speedy resolution. Meanwhile, training sessions focused on product and engineering made for smooth onboarding.
Another factor that has really impressed Dialectica is Persona’s ability and willingness to consider building tools and capabilities that specifically address Dialectica’s needs. Being able to inform Persona’s product roadmap in this way means Dialectica can be sure the platform is evolving in a way that will continue to benefit the company for years to come.
“Being able to brainstorm together about what the platform’s current capabilities are and what the future might look like is incredibly helpful,” says Emmanuelle. “Knowing that the Persona team is willing to listen and see if they can build something to meet our needs demonstrates their commitment to our success.”
The number of verified experts has been growing over time as we’ve rolled verification out across more clients and automated the process. Conversions are higher, and the entire process is smoother, and it's due to a collaboration between our two teams.
Results: With Persona, Dialectica reduces the threat of expert fraud while controlling friction
Today, Dialectica has successfully automated identity verification for its experts and made the service available to any client that requires it. In doing so, the company has demonstrated that it is taking expert verification seriously and improved its standing with existing clients.
Importantly, requiring verification hasn’t introduced undue friction or harmed conversion rates. In fact, conversions have been on the rise as Persona’s automated solution is speedier than previous manual verification methods.
“The number of verified experts has been growing over time as we’ve rolled verification out across more clients and automated the process,” says Emmanuelle. “Conversions are higher, and the entire process is smoother, and it's due to a collaboration between our two teams.”
