Enormous knowledge of the industry and a broad range of experience has helped Oliver Obitayo culminate into one of the Fintech experts the industry has today. His nearly 20 years of professional experience includes key positions at Hewlett-Packard, the Siemens subsidiary Unify, Gemini Strategy Consulting, or EY (Ernst & Young). Oliver has been working as CSO at IDnow since 2018 and is an expert in sales strategy, marketing, and global growth development and was also honored with the Global All-Star Marketing Award at HP. Oliver works across the globe and knows what it means to drive business and manage teams in Germany, Europe, or the US and be culturally savvy in the Middle East or Asia.
The challenges of a rapidly growing company and the complex requirements of the industry demand full commitment and often unconventional solutions – and this is Oliver’s genius zone. In combination with strong analytical skills, exceptional creativity helps him lead his team and IDnow to success.
"IDnow’s platform seamlessly integrates into a company’s digital workflow across desktop, tablet, and mobile to provide the very best onboarding user experience for end-users and enhanced conversion rates for companies."
“Predictability and being cliché is boring,” says Oliver. “IDnow is a pioneer in the identify verification space and it’s important to me to keep this role and always stay a step ahead when it comes to technology, security and processes, users love.” Their biggest achievement is the innovation driver remote identity verification and helping companies transform these regulations “prescribed” processes into a business and customer-focused value add. “Whatever I have sold and marketed in my career, it is about finding ways so it makes real sense for the customer and adds business value,” he adds.
IDnow’s platform seamlessly integrates into a company’s digital workflow across desktop, tablet, and mobile to provide the very best onboarding user experience for end-users and enhanced conversion rates for companies. With artificial intelligence-powered algorithms and a unique document database of real-world data, IDnow can verify persons and identity documents from over 193 countries using their passports, driver’s license, or government-issued identity documents. The global document coverage, instant processes, best-in-class tech, many years of experience with different regulations, and a huge portion of passion for what we do is the key to success. “This is how the platform and we as a team offer solutions for various use cases for different industries and regulatory environments,” adds Oliver.
According to him, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated global digitalization – experts suggest by as much as five to eight years. Many industries and businesses have had to quickly adapt and pivot to retain their share of the market, placing huge pressure on firms to implement technology to deliver this digital, remote experience – or enable their workforce to be enabled and productive non-office environment. Thankfully, technology innovation has been the main driver of the identity verification market for many years, enabling the sector to meet the significant rise in demand with speed and efficiency.
“In our recent Security Report, we reported significantly higher demand for our products and services as restrictions around COVID-19 continue to push digitization. There was a strong increase of 250% in fraud attempts this year, with new developments in identity fraud heavily impacting the global cybercrime figures,” explains Oliver. “Our order intakes rose by 358% year-on-year, while transactions via IDnow AudoIdent grew tenfold. For 2021 then, I expect to see a focus on embedding and improving some key technologies that make the identity verification market as secure as it is.”
IDnow’s priorities shortly will be enhancing and increasing the use of Artificial Intelligence and sophisticated technology to drive automation and detection of dynamic security features in ID documents. Besides, machine learning, biometric face recognition, 3D modeling, wallet and reusability, and fully mobile and automated, integrated electronic signatures (eIDAS standard) processes will be improved and further adapted to maximize user experience and convenience. “I also expect massive progress and the launch of our global identity verification platform that caters to the different KYC client needs within multi-geographical, multi-regulatory frameworks in order to maximize conversion, fraud prevention and user experience in a compliant way. All that provided via one API/SDK,” adds Oliver.IE
Oliver Obitayo
CSO of IDnow
IDnow covers a wide range of use cases both in regulated sectors in Europe and for completely new digital business models worldwide. The platform allows the identity flow to be adapted to different regional, legal, and business requirements on a per use case basis. IDnow is supported by venture capital investors Corsair Capital, BayBG, Seventure Partner, G+D Ventures as well as a consortium of renowned business angels. Its portfolio of over 350 customers includes leading international companies from various industries such as Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, eventim, Raisin (Weltsparen), Sixt, solarisBank, Telefonica Deutschland, UBS and Western Union as well as fintechs such as Fidor, N26, smava, and wefox.