Socure Pushes for Financial Inclusion at Money20/20

Socure is looking back at some of its highlights from last week’s Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. The financial conference was once again taking place in-person after the 2020 event took place virtually due to the threat of COVID-19.

For its part, Socure focused primarily on financial inclusion, calling attention to some of the ways in which machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies can make it easier for marginalized groups to gain access to modern financial services. In that regard, the company’s Digital Identity Fairness & Inclusion Report was released to coincide with the flagship financial event, and Socure Co-founder and CEO Johnny Ayers addressed the findings in a keynote presentation with Reddit founder and venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian.

The goal, according to both Ayers and the report, is to increase the number of people that can be auto-approved for financial services. In order to do so, companies like Socure need to get rid of the algorithmic biases that have plagued AI systems in the past. For example, many risk scoring systems may make false assumptions about people of certain ethnic or socioeconomic backgrounds, which in turn makes it more likely that those people will be turned away when they try to sign up for a bank account (or another service) online.

Socure has been trying to overcome that problem with its own identity platform, and chronicled its efforts in its report. The company noted that its own technology has much higher auto-approval rates for Black, Asian, and Hispanic individuals, and for younger and immigrant populations with less extensive credit histories. That, in turn, helps mitigate the impact of bias and allows more people to participate in the broader financial ecosystem.

In other news, Socure celebrated the debut of Sigma Identity Fraud, a new fraud prevention solution that was also released in conjunction with Money20/20. Socure claims that Sigma can boost auto-approval rates by as much as 60 percent, while reducing the number of false positives by a factor of 13. That translates to a much better overall experience for legitimate users, who can be approved with a minimal amount of friction. Socure itself uses feedback from more than 750 clients to continue to improve its identification and risk scoring technology.

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November 2, 2021 – by Eric Weiss