Payfone Declares Latest Investment Will Accelerate Privacy-First Customer Identification Management Platform with Strategic Acquisitions

Phone intelligence is undergoing a massive transformation as brands and omnichannel marketing platforms aim to deliver a smooth parallel customer experience. The Customer Experience goals can’t be fully verified without authenticating the user identity and thus prevent fraud. Therefore, CX is complete only when integrated alongside identity verification and authentication analytics software and APIs for omnichannel account interaction across the web, mobile, voice and call centers.

Latest Threats: Burner Phones, Spoofed Calls, Real-Time SIM Swap Fraud, and Synthetic Identities

Leading customer identity authentication and analytics management platform Payfone has announced it raised $100 million in its recent funding round. The API provider for identity verification and authentication software intends to secure its marketing budget and further innovate in machine learning capabilities for the omni-channel industry.

A New-York based startup, Payfone is setting a new standard for digital identity verification and authentication. Its customer identity platform enables the world’s largest financial institutions, healthcare organizations and technology companies to bring speed and security to their on-boarding, digital servicing and call center processes.

Currently, Payfone offers four major products to the call centers. These are:

Trust Score, behavioral and phone intelligence analytics to identify and prevent account-related fraud.

Fonebook, Automated customer record management and updation tool to verify account records based on mobile, website, and app logins, and call agent input.

Identity Pre-Fill and Identity Verify, secured and walled private information matching tool based on details provided by the customer.

Instant Authentication, for Voice and Mobile based on inbound calls and SMS OTP.

Payfone’s Real-Time Fraud and Risk Signals to Prevent Account Takeovers

At the time of this announcement, Rodger Desai, CEO of Payfone, said, “The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the secure passport for navigating our digital lives. With one in three US consumers already authenticated by Payfone, this investment accelerates our ability to set the standard for the authentication process. As we build out a cross-industry consortium, more enterprises will be able to access Payfone’s real-time fraud and risk signals to prevent account takeovers while passing more transactions.”

Payfone’s authentication solutions, including its unique Trust Score™ tool, are built on ten years of proprietary phone intelligence that enable Payfoneto anonymously measure a phone number’s reputation and risk with real-time processing of behavioral signals. Payfone’s platform instantly detects burner phones, spoofed calls, real-time SIM swap fraud, and synthetic identities, while removing friction from legitimate transactions.

Payfone also provides call verification solutions that run passively in the background of a phone call, allowing faster issue resolution.

Daniel O’Keefe, Managing Partner of Apax Digital said, “Identity is the key enabling technology for the next generation of digital businesses. Payfone’s Trust Score™ is core to the real-time decisioning that enterprises need in order to drive revenue while thwarting fraud and protecting privacy.”

Zach Fuchs, Principal of Apax Digital added, “Payfone’s technology enables frictionless customer experience while curbing the mounting operating expense caused by manual review.” Concurrent with the investment, Mr. O’Keefe and Mr. Fuchs will join Payfone’s board of directors.

Joining the investment round are new investors Sandbox Insurtech Ventures and Ralph de la Vega, the former Vice Chairman of AT&T. Existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Synchrony, [Blue Venture Fund, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas,] Wellington Management LLP, and former CEO of LexisNexis Andrew Prozes also participated.

Currently, Payfone is a rapidly growing software and data analytics company based in New York. Payfone’s customer identity platform secures the digital experiences of the banking, insurance, telecommunication, retail, and healthcare industries. Its patented Trust Score™ enables enterprises to pass more digital transactions while thwarting fraud attacks.