Although Brazil and Mexico are the most powerful economies in Latin America, they are also the ones with the highest crime rates. One of the most frequent crimes in these countries is identity frauds.
To avoid this, countries respond with bureaucracy, which causes some processes to slow down enormously. For example, in Brazil, opening a bank account can take up to 15 days due to all the necessary verifications that are made manually. Lincoln Ando decided to face this problem with artificial intelligence algorithms and data analysis. This is how the IDWall platform was born: by reducing time processes to be less than three minutes. Thanks to this advancement, the young man has become one of the winners of the Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2018 from MIT Technology Review in Spanish.
The first time that Ando faced an identity fraud problem was in 2011 while working for the first 100% digital bank in Brazil. After three years trying to solve the problem, he concluded that "large companies are too slow to create and innovate," so he decided to go to the USA to continue his training in security. Upon his return, he participated in the creation of VaiVolta, a marketplace for the construction sector, and it was then again that he realized that he was faced with the problem of establishing a relationship of trust between two parties that do not know each other. "False construction companies rent materials and disappear leaving without a trace," the young Brazilian says.
This is how IDWall came about in 2016, a platform that businesses can use to verify the identity of their customers to avoid losses related to identity fraud. The platform allows companies to check the validity of any identity document through a photograph, contrasting it with the data of the various official bodies that sell them. Then, by capturing a series of consecutive photographs of the subject, it is verified that the client is indeed who he claims to be and that he is real and not being supplanted by a picture or other means. In a third step, the platform checks the client's liquidity in more than 200 data sources, from delinquent lists to lists of judicial resolutions.
"Car rental companies lose hundreds of vehicles every month," explains Ando. Now, these types of companies can substitute manual checks for a query to IDWall and thus avoid millions in losses. Banks, e-commerce, and other financial services are among more than 100 clients that already rely on the technology developed by Ando.
The founder and CTO of SimMachines, Arnoldo Müller-Molina, an Innovators under 35 Central America 2014 winner and jury member of Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2018, appreciates that Ando "has created a solution that allows two parties to initiate a trust relationship in real time".
