#90 - Victor Fredung, CEO of Shufti Pro - On how a startup became the fastest growing provider in ID verification

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that enables banks to grow faster by making communication with their customers easier, faster and more secure. My guest is Victor Fredung, CEO of Shufti Pro.Victor Fredung has many years in the payments field and has founded several successful FinTech companies, such as Ogion Consulting, GiroSwift LTD, Zensed and Stafftimer. Owning and operating several payment companies gave Victor a great insight into the troubles that a lot of Financial Services /FinTech companies are facing and what needs to be built to solve them.Our interview will focus on his work as CEO of ID Verification company Shufti Pro, a platform that enables banks and FinTech companies to expand their business safely by enabling them to verify 7 billion people living on the planet, with 99.6% precision.This triggered me, and hence I invited Victor to my podcast. We explore the challenges that a lack of identity verification options creates for banks and FinTechs. We then discuss Shufti Pro’s approach to fix this by taking a counterintuitive – but very effective approach.Here are some of his quotes:Identity verification has been existing in Europe and in the US for quite some time. But still, some parts of the world it is still not really covered when it comes to verifying individuals.The technology hasn't really been in that place as of late, but a in the past few years this technology has been exploding in those areas as well. So that's why we feel it's important to include every country in the world.What actually happens [not covering different regions] is that companies exclude those regions as well. They can't really do business with particular clients from different region. They try to exclude them and only focus on the countries which they're actually accepted in.When we tried our competitors, we experienced very unsuccessful results. We basically had huge customer drops in terms of verifying their identities and the delays it took for verifying them. To be honest, it pissed us off a little bit, because we started losing more and more customers. So, we basically decided: ‘Hey, let's do something about it’.During this interview, you will learn three things:Why focusing on the solving a universal problem enables you to remain flexible and expand your business dramatically over timeThat to create defensible differentiation you have to be prepared to take a contrarian approach in solving the complete problemHow devotion and hard work will always pay off and eventually turn customers into fans. Once this happens and they start talking about it to each other you’ll outgrow every competitor in your industry