When Mission Meets Business Objectives: Betterment Reduces Fraud While Helping the World Invest Better

Deploying Socure’s technology has significantly increased our ability to accurately pinpoint identity theft while also enabling us to auto-accept more good applicants. Our manual account reviews have also decreased dramatically. The innovations delivered by Socure help us to stay ahead of fraud trends while continuing to provide an optimal experience for our customers.”

– Mark Kassardjian, Director of Operations, Betterment

As the country’s largest independent digital investment advisor, Betterment knows the challenges of creating a safe digital environment. In their case, it’s not just about keeping customers’ assets safe, but protecting the identities of the customers themselves.

“We need to know we can trust everyone we’re letting onto the platform,” said Mark Kassardjian, Betterment Director of Operations. “Good identity verification at onboarding is crucial to building trust with customers and preventing identity theft.”

Betterment has always prioritized identity verification and fraud prevention, and previously relied on automated background checks and a proprietary document upload tool that sought to ensure only good actors were allowed onto their investment platform. But as the company grew larger and fraudsters became increasingly sophisticated, Kassardjian wanted a system that could prevent fraud while reducing onboarding friction at scale, all in an effort to accelerate customer growth.

“Betterment has grown a lot over the last five years,” said Kassardjian. “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.”

Auto-Approvals and the Way Forward

Betterment was looking for a trusted partner, one with a successful track record for deploying market-leading identity verification and fraud prediction solutions as a pathway to better business outcomes. “We had a massive list of anti-fraud companies to consider,” said Kassardjian.

As they went down their list, Socure stood out from the crowd. “The combination of Predictive DocV, Email RiskScore, Phone RiskScore, and Address RiskScore put Socure at the top of the list,” said Kassardjian. “The fact that we could automate document review and also have risk scoring running in the background was super compelling. Socure was the only provider who could give us that level of auto-approval accuracy, background risk score analysis, and reduction in manual reviews.”

Putting Socure to the Test

Facing the high-stakes challenge of verifying identities at onboarding without introducing friction, Betterment wanted to see Socure solutions in action before committing. They put Socure through extensive testing in their software environment. “Socure was the only vendor we took to the proof-of-concept stage,” says Kassardjian. “We liked that Socure has really good solution testing, so we started that process of sending data back-and-forth.”

Even while the proof-of-concept was running, the fraud and ID landscape was changing rapidly, with Real IDs rolling out across different states and fraud hitting record numbers across the internet. In this fraught environment, it’s not surprising that Socure was put to the test from day one.

What Happened Next?

How did Socure hold up to Betterment’s high expectations? What changed for Betterment when its Socure solutions went from in-theory to real-life? Download the full case study to learn how Betterment was able to increase auto-approvals by 30% while reducing customer drop-off and unlocking growth.