2020 Year in Review — Shaping the Future of Digital Identification

How we worked to build online trust through 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic and a sneak peek of what’s to come

This year, we have achieved many accomplishments here at Passbase. We doubled our team, grew our client base tenfold and launched many exciting features for our developer community and clients. Looking back, we can now clearly see the major leaps we took with our product, laying the solid groundwork for more game changing features to come in 2021.

When we are in the thick of developing, it is often easy to focus on what still needs to be done. Now is the time to reflect on 2020’s highlights.

Expanding the identity verification suite

Powered by Passbase’s core verification engine, we have rolled out a suite of solutions including Liveness Detection and Age Verification. We’ve also introduced a powerful watchlist solution to offer AML/CTF due diligence checks globally with a syndicate of global, regional, national, and industry-specific registers.

Introducing transparent product updates

In March, we introduced a Product Update Ticker to keep the community up to date on our latest features and improvements. Some big highlights include:

• An intuitive and user friendly integration flow
• Self-service webhooks
• A new Passbase Dashboard supercharged with customizations
• Re-authentication flow that verifies returning users in seconds with no passwords

We also continuously add language support for Passbase and to date, we offer the following languages for iOS, Android, and web:

• 🇨🇳 Chinese (Simplified)
• 🇩🇰 Danish
• 🇳🇱 Dutch (Netherlands)
• 🇺🇸 English (US)
• 🇫🇷 French
• 🇮🇹 Italian
• 🇯🇵 Japanese
• 🇩🇪 German
• 🇪🇸 Spanish
• 🇱🇻 Latvian
• 🇱🇹 Lithuanian
• 🇵🇱 Polish
• 🇵🇹 Portuguese
• 🇷🇺 Russian

You can stay tuned to our bi-weekly updates in our Product Update Ticker. If you are a developer, you can open a feature request.

Featuring our no code solution on Product Hunt

In June, we launched our codeless solution on Product Hunt and were lucky to be recognised as #2 product of the week (and the most upvoted identity verification tool). Some of the new features that we highlighted on the platform included:

• Handling multiple projects and verification flows
• Hyper customised the “Verify me” button color
• Adding additional security checks
• Drag and drop verification flows
• Choosing your accepted countries

Upgrading our API and SDKs

We are committed to creating a great integration and developer experience. In March, we launched our Passbase APIs and in June introduced an API explorer with the option to activate webhooks in the Sandbox mode. By October, we launched API V2, which makes it even easier to communicate with the Passbase platform and retrieve information about the status of verifications

This year, we have also upgraded all of our client-side SDKs as well as launched our server-side SDKs to significantly speed up the end user verification process for our clients and shortened the integration time for developers.

To date, Passbase offers:

• Web SDKs for HTML + Javascript, React, Angular, hosted integration
• Mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, Reactive Native, Flutter
• Server-side SDKs: Node, Ruby, Go, PHP, Java, Python

You can get started in minutes by following our Youtube developer tutorials and developer docs.

In addition, we offer no code solutions including:

• No code integration for verification service, webhooks, and API access
• Zapier integration for workflows

Doing our part for COVID-19 and communities in need

In March, COVID-19 sent Passbase down a path that differed greatly from what we had planned back in January. During the early days of these unprecedented times, Passbase decided to give priority integration support and waive all subscription fees for health startups with verification needs and companies dedicated to helping individuals get through the COVID-19 crisis.

One of our clients, the German telemedicine platform TeleClinic, was directly involved in helping diagnose staff at a car plant which reported the first COVID-19 infection in the country.

We are also proud to have partnered with Las Vegas PRIDE to integrate identity and age verification for their adult programming arm with minimal technical requirements for them. We were humbled to support the non-profit in its efforts to create safe community spaces as it moved activities online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We believe our no code solution will enable many more organizations to introduce security features to their communities as we stay connected through technology.

Getting recognition in the cybersecurity industry

We are humbled by the response that we’ve received from both the developer community and the cybersecurity industry this year. Passbase was listed as one of the top cybersecurity startups to watch in EU Startups and by Alex Mitchell and recognized in the CB Insights Cyber Defenders list.

In addition, we have joined various industry discussions such as the FinTECHTalents Open Finance in December this year. These are signs that we are headed in the right direction and we will relentlessly improve our products and services to continue to earn this recognition and build industry trust.

Reach out to me if you are organizing an industry event that would like to address digital identity verification and building online trust.

Doubling our talent and opportunities

We could not have moved this fast without the tireless efforts of every Passbase team member. Since the beginning of 2020, we have nearly doubled our team from 16 to 30 people. We’ve added more firepower to the engineering department, but have also built out Growth, Sales, Talent, Customer Experience, and Product departments to ensure that we are building a robust and scalable team delivering a world-class product for clients and partners.

This year, Andrei Strugaru joined as VP of Engineering, Dan Lee as our VP of Sales, Sidney François as our VP of Product to build a strong foundation from which we will launch into more ambitious goals for next year. Every new member has made an impact from day one, such as Jenna Bachrouche in Talent to recruit people with the DNA to push our company and culture further, and Amanda Gorfine as our first Solutions Engineer to deliver on our commitment to developer support and client success.

Onwards to 2021

With our growing team, we are ready to take on bigger challenges in 2021. We believe that accessibility is the cornerstone of an industry-standard tool, so we are doubling down on building workflow features and integrations. In parallel, we will continue to push the limits of customization for both our no code solution and developers working with our APIs. You can also expect a modularity aspect to our identity verification engine.

We are already working with global companies such as AppJobs handling high volume verifications and are continuously signing on new clients. Every new client is a partner in our journey to improving how Passbase can link to your everyday tools, bringing consumer-grade user experience to enterprise-grade workflows.

We are expected to conclude our security certifications of SOC2 and ISO 27001 in the first half of 2021. Global brands as well as enterprise clients can expect new features specifically tailored for their needs.

Beyond that we are incredibly excited about the new year to come and further scale our team and product!