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Onfido / Entrust

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PPP
Updated
  • Type: Document and biometric identity-verification provider.
  • Founded: 2012, by Oxford students Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin.
  • Pandemic role: Identity-verification vendor inside Blueacorn's PPP application funnel; not a lender.
  • Current status: Part of Entrust, which completed its acquisition of Onfido on April 9, 2024.

In early April 2021 Blueacorn made Onfido's document-and-selfie check its primary identity test for PPP applicants, in place of IDology's knowledge-based questions, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found. Blueacorn processed nearly all of the 2021 PPP loans made by Capital Plus and Prestamos, the two largest lenders that year by loan count. Three years later Entrust bought Onfido for a reported $650 million.

Before the pandemic

Onfido came out of Oxford University Innovation's incubator in 2012, founded by Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin. TechCrunch described the London-based company in April 2020 as using AI to "read" a person's identity documents and then facial recognition and other data points to check that the person is who they say they are online. Its customers included major banks, government bodies and recruiters.

During the pandemic

On April 15, 2020 Onfido announced a $100 million round led by TPG. TechCrunch tied the raise to "contactless" business and listed pandemic use cases the company was pursuing: virtual voting, passport and visa applications, and contact tracing. In November 2020 Kassai handed the chief executive job to Mike Tuchen, the former Talend CEO, with the aim of an IPO "at some point"; by then Onfido had raised more than $200 million.

Onfido's own Identity Fraud Report 2020, published December 7, 2020, said identity-fraud rates "spiked during the first lockdown, and have stayed up ever since."

Pandemic-relief role

The subcommittee's December 2022 staff report, "We Are Not the Fraud Police," says Blueacorn relied on four off-the-shelf products, Plaid, Giact, Onfido and IDology, to "help improve our risk posture and mitigate fraud." Blueacorn started using IDology at the end of March 2021. It found IDology's multiple-choice questions "quite difficult" for many PPP applicants, and the tool flagged a large number of applications as suspicious. Beginning in early April 2021, the report says, Blueacorn used Onfido "as its primary method of identity verification instead of the more rigorous IDology questions or human reviews." After the switch, applicants reached IDology only if they failed Onfido or were flagged later in the process.

The subcommittee counted the switch among the ways Blueacorn set aside a tool "to decrease the amount of potential fraud flagged and increase the number of applicants receiving loans (which, by extension, would increase Blueacorn's profits)." Blueacorn chose the routing; Capital Plus and Prestamos were the lenders. The report makes no finding against Onfido.

Two proposed classes sued Onfido under Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, alleging it collected face biometrics without consent. In April 2023 Onfido agreed to settle for $28.5 million, from which $9.4 million in attorneys' fees was to come, Biometric Update reported. The settlement website says Onfido denies that it violated any law and lists a final judgment and order of dismissal with prejudice.

After the pandemic

TechCrunch reported in February 2024 that Entrust was buying Onfido and that sources put the price at $650 million. Entrust announced completion on April 9, 2024 and did not give the price. Its release said Onfido had over $140 million in annual revenue, more than 500 employees and over 1,200 customers, and it cited an Onfido report of a 3,000 percent increase in deepfakes over the previous year.

Sources

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