Mozido Invests In Authenticating The Unbanked

Mozido announced today that it will participate in the Series B financing of IdentityMind Global, a risk management platform that authenticates consumers using mobile devices to transact with merchants.  IdentityMind’s platform allows merchants to authenticate the identity of a consumer, even if that consumer is unbanked or has a “thin” credit file. This makes the IdentityMind platform ideal for transacting in environments which have large populations of un-or under-banked consumers.

As part of the investment, Mozido has formed a strategic partnership to integrate the IdentityMind platform into Mozido’s cloud-based MoTEAF mobile ecosystem which brings financial inclusion to the billions around the world without access to traditional banking and payments channels. Mozido President Mike Love remarked that since “Mozido serves customers around the world that require specialized products and services to help them manage risk and secure compliance” that its investment in IdentityMind “increases our capabilities in this critical area.”

The announcement outlined the key benefits that merchants can expect to receive from this partnership:

• Recognition of both the user and the device she is using.
• Identification of the user across dozens of data sources.
• Authentication of the transaction across Mozido’s MoTEAF platform.
• Security of the transaction regardless of the device used.

IdentityMind President and CEO Garrett Gafke said that preventing fraud in a card not present world is only as effective as the ability for that merchant to identify the consumer. And, those without credit histories or banking relationships are hard to identify and therefore, authenticate. Most of those, Gafke says, are the unbanked.

“[Authenticating a user] is particularly important in mobile commerce where online merchants sacrifice collecting information for reducing friction in the mobile payment/registration process, and mobile adoption is larger within underbanked and unbanked demographics.”

The integration of IdentityMind’s unique risk management platform, Gafke points out, allows merchants to both identify and validate a consumers on the basis of her activities online and offline and authorize the transaction.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.