Top grocery technology platform quickly onboarded and reverified shoppers to foster trust and safety on its platform with Persona

Problem: The grocery technology company’s shopper verification process was largely manual and unscalable

For delivery platforms, trust and safety is paramount — shoppers want to know that their account is safe, while customers want to be able to trust their shopper to deliver the correct order promptly.

To keep its platform, customers, and shoppers safe, the organization verified shoppers' identities both at signup and on a continual basis — an initiative headed by its senior manager of fraud and identity. “As [our company] grew, we decided we needed a specific team to handle identity issues and make sure each shopper is the right person doing their job,” he explained.

While this may sound simple, it required juggling multiple priorities, including:

• Ensuring users have a good experience. The delivery platform needed a fast and efficient way for an applicant to become a shopper, as the more friction it introduced, the higher the chance shoppers wouldn’t follow through with it.

• Keeping out bad actors. Part of the goal of identity verification was making sure bad actors weren’t getting into other people’s accounts and accessing PII or other sensitive data.

• Validating that shoppers are actually who they claim to be. In the on-demand economy, the grocery technology company onboarded people based on criteria they can perform, but it didn’t actively observe them doing their work. As such, making sure the person who signed up is actually the one doing the work was important.

• Accomplishing the above without a heavy operational burden. The delivery platform could hire many people to do these checks manually, but it didn’t feel it made sense at its volume. As such, it wanted a vendor to provide accurate assessments of identity and minimize the amount of manual work its team had to do.

Before Persona, the leading grocery delivery platform partnered with other solutions to verify shoppers. However, it quickly found that these vendors weren’t able to streamline as much of the process as it was looking for. “While testing other identity vendors, we noticed gaps and accuracy issues, so we ended up relying more on manual review. We knew we needed a partner that could stay ahead of the curve and meet the challenges we’re currently facing,” explained its senior manager of fraud and identity.

To help future-proof its identity operations, it set out to find a new identity partner.

Solution: The grocery delivery company used Persona to seamlessly verify shoppers and grow its platform

Despite a strong culture of building solutions in-house, the grocery technology company knew it made sense to partner with an expert in identity. “We try to do as much as we can on our own, but when it comes to big volumes and building out something very complex like an identity program, it made sense to go with a vendor,” explained its senior manager of fraud and identity.

After evaluating multiple solutions, it ultimately decided to partner with Persona for the following reasons:

Seamless shopper onboarding

First and foremost, the delivery platform partnered with Persona to quickly and accurately verify shoppers. Automated KYC verification is the bread and butter of what Persona offered the delivery service. It used Persona’s tech to make sure people were submitting authentic driver’s licenses and selfies, which was very valuable for the company to maintain trust and safety on its platform.

When it comes to maximizing conversion, speed is key. Most people signing up want to start as soon as possible, and any delays in the verification process delay how soon they can use the platform. Automating the process with Persona allowed the delivery platform to offer a better, more seamless experience and get individuals on the platform faster. Some people were even approved in less than an hour, which was helpful for the individual and helped the grocery delivery service grow its business quickly.

While automatic verifications are helpful, the company also appreciated how Persona allowed it to customize its verification flows. 

One area where this came in handy was adding tips to guide users having trouble getting through the verification process. “The last thing we want is for users to have to contact support or try again,” the senior manager of fraud and identity explained. “Dynamic Flow allows us to get more granular with specific use cases and give enough direction to help good actors get through the verification process successfully without telling bad actors why they failed or opening us up to a bunch of potential fraud by loosening friction.”

This also meant the company could deploy different flows for different use cases instead of treating everyone the same — for example, shoppers who had already successfully verified their identity through Persona could reverify themselves with just a selfie, whereas shoppers verifying themselves for the first time needed to submit both a government ID and selfie.

Account takeover prevention via periodic reverification

The grocery delivery platform also relied on Persona to reverify users to protect their accounts — and ensure their IDs were current. The ability to continuously check on who was doing the work and also being able to leverage when the company wanted to perform these checks based on specific scenarios was very important and valuable to the team.

To streamline the process, the grocery technology platform had shoppers reverify their identity by simply taking a selfie. Persona then compared it to the portrait on the government ID they uploaded when they first onboarded. The ability to facial match the identity of the person taking a selfie later on and tie that back to their original images was essential. Persona also checked for liveness — having the ability to detect when it’s a still image versus a live image, which was very beneficial to the team.

To further protect accounts, the grocery technology platform also used Persona’s list feature to deny known fraudsters. If it saw the same person in driver’s license photos and selfies using a different account, it could add them to a block list so no matter what identity they’ve created, it could detect that was the same bad actor and block the individual from getting any further.

Configurable manual review hub

For the grocery technology platform, the goal wasn’t to eliminate manual reviews — it was to conduct reviews as efficiently as possible. “The amount of manual review we used to do was pretty high. As our shopper base has grown, we knew we had to figure out a more scalable solution,” he added.

Its solution: Persona’s automated KYC paired with Cases, which became the delivery platform’s home base for manual review.

Before Persona, the grocery platform was struggling with disjointed data and tools during the manual review process. “Our old vendors would provide backend data, and we’d have to ingest that and do most of the reviews and actions within our own system, which required a lot of engineering effort on our side.”

To the company, this seemed unnecessary. As its fraud and identity manager explained, “Building those tools internally is a lot more maintenance. We’re a growing company with a lot of priorities we’re constantly juggling.”

When the delivery platform discovered our configurable case management and manual investigation tool, it was like a breath of fresh air for the team. “If we were doing it internally, we’d need to have 3-5 tabs open with different information to get the big picture, whereas with Persona’s UI, we can see all of an account’s inquiries, its history, and what’s failed or passed — all on one timeline,” said its manager. “Having a one-stop shop to conduct reviews and take follow-up actions allows us to get them done as fast as possible without needing to borrow or use more business resources.”

In addition to having everything in one place and being able to track metrics like SLAs, the grocery delivery platform was also grateful for the ability to customize Cases to meet its specific needs.

“We all like the way Cases is built and the way we can customize it,” its manager shared.

“We can assign agents a certain number of reviews, and we can use tags to put specific types of cases into a queue for specific agents to view. If a certain type of review should be handled by more junior team members and another should be handled by higher-level team members, we can assign the flow to go to each of those channels and ensure the appropriate team is doing the review.”

With Persona, the top grocery technology platform saved valuable time not having to manually review as many cases. 

“Now, we review very specific cases instead of a wider net we used to have to cast, because our previous vendors didn’t have all the different fraud flags available. With Persona, we can change the parameters as we see things that are more important to focus on — noting which situations are ‘hard nos’ and which need manual review.”

Partnership and expertise

Finally, this leading grocery technology platform appreciated its close partnership with the Persona team. As its manager eloquently put it, “Anybody can buy a product, but the service that comes with that product is equally important.”

With Persona, the delivery platform got the best of both worlds — being able to self-serve whenever they want, but also having identity experts at its fingertips. “Persona gives us the ability to go in and make changes ourselves, but sometimes at the end of the day, we prefer to lean on the Persona team, who’s always receptive and available to help us craft or advise us on changes we want to make based on their experience partnering with other businesses.”

This expertise allowed the grocery delivery platform to focus on what was important to its team instead of having to become experts in the identity space. “It’s nice not having to worry about Persona,” its manager shared. “They’re constantly improving the product, and that allows us more time to do other things on our side of the business that are important without having to double-check and worry about what they’re doing.”

As a fast-moving company, the leading grocery technology platform especially appreciated Persona’s constant communication. “Having a very accountable and dependable team to work with has been one of the best aspects of working with Persona. We have consistent meetings where we’re delivering feedback, and during crunch times when there’s an issue at hand, getting that immediate support and follow-through is very valuable.”

Results: The grocery technology platform future-proofed its identity program by partnering with Persona’s agile, product-driven team and flexible platform

Thanks to Persona, the leading grocery delivery platform quickly verified users while maintaining high pass rates. This helped it offer a better user experience and ultimately grow its user base — while simultaneously protecting its users and platform.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the delivery platform rested easy knowing Persona would help it scale and stay on top of emerging fraud trends.

While the grocery technology platform originally came to Persona for KYC, it got much more than it planned for. “Persona feels as invested in the partnership as we are — they didn’t leave us to figure everything out once we signed the contract. With Persona, we know they’ll grow and adapt to wherever we need to go as things change.”

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