How VerumID Makes Banking Workflows Easier With Verifiable Credentials

VerumID, a leading company in verifiable credentials, is changing how businesses handle documentation and identity verification. By using Truvity's advanced SSI technology, VerumID tackles complex security and efficiency issues in the banking sector.

We spoke to Nenad Ivanovic, Lead Developer, and Jelena Dorotka, the Chief Product Officer at VerumID, to discuss the specific challenges VerumID faced, how Truvity helped tackle these challenges, and the significant improvements achieved through using Truvity’s SSI solutions.

Introducing verifiable credentials in business processes

Nenad first walked us through the company's mission: “We aim to introduce verifiable credentials in various business processes where you typically use documents or paperwork.” This includes legal documents, ID cards, and other forms of verification that traditionally rely on physical paperwork. 

Verifiable credentials provide advantages within old school processes by being instantly auditable, verifiable, and shareable, unlike their paper counterparts.

Jelena elaborates that VerumID isn’t just about digitizing documents. The company wants to create a trusted ecosystem where credentials are reusable, portable, and ideally, universally accepted. “Our product will be like a marketplace, similar to Booking.com, but for certification and translation services.”

Before getting started with Truvity, the team at VerumID struggled with the complexities of the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) domain. Nenad highlights some technical difficulties: “It involves handling JSON-LD, cryptography, managing wallets, and other related technologies.” 

Building their own self-sovereign identity solution from scratch wasn't feasible due to the time and resources required. Which is why Nenad turned to Truvity’s API/SDK for help.

Ensuring the authenticity of individuals with Truvity’s SSI solution

The main issue VerumID aims to solve in the banking sector right now is ensuring the authenticity of individuals behind transactions and requests, in order to reduce fraud. Nenad elaborates, “The core problem is ensuring that the person behind a request or credential is who they claim to be, essentially reducing fraud within the banking system.”

For their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and proof of concept, VerumID targets banks and wealth management funds, specifically.

Jelena notes that while these are their initial targets, they have plans to expand into other sectors like legal services, which also require stringent identity verification. “What we’ve done so far is just the foundation, but it’s the foundation we’ll build on with different types of credentials and services.”

Nenad: “After we validate our proof of concept, we plan to expand to other service providers like lawyers or notaries, who also need to verify and authorize their services digitally.” 

VerumID can potentially serve any business that needs to build trust with their customers and counterparties. For now, however, the banking industry remains their core target audience.

VerumID also evaluated other SSI solutions before choosing Truvity. Nenad: “We looked into other SSI solutions, including Walt.id. Their approach required building your own credentials from JSON, which added complexity.” Truvity, in contrast, simplifies the identity verification process, allowing VerumID to focus on their domain-specific issues.

Creating credentials for better efficiency and security

VerumID primarily uses Truvity for creating and issuing credentials. Nenad explains, “We handle basic flows like creating draft credentials, updating them, and issuing them when requests are completed.”

He also provided us with a very detailed example of how VerumID currently uses Truvity for payment requests: 

“The client needs to create a wallet in the system using an API key. They fill out a payment request form, which we update iteratively. Behind the scenes, we create and update a draft credential on Truvity. When the request is finalized, we issue the credential and send it to the bank. The bank processes the payment offline and then creates a confirmation credential, which is sent back to the user.”

Using Truvity has significantly improved efficiency and security of the identity verification processes VerumID is building. Nenad explains, “It reduces the risk of fraud and ensures that all actions are performed by verified individuals. It replaces traditional, less secure methods like emails, phone calls, and WhatsApp, which are prone to email spoofing and delays.”

Truvity: Five times faster than developing an SSI solution yourself

From a developer's perspective, Nenad emphasizes the substantial time savings: “Using Truvity has made the process at least five times faster compared to developing our own SSI solution. This improvement allows us to focus on our use cases rather than the underlying SSI complexities.”

As far as time-savings go, Jelena emphatically echoes this sentiment: “I can't even describe the challenges we'd face if it weren't for Truvity. We'd need to learn SSI and build all the mechanics ourselves, which Truvity has already done. Without an API provider like Truvity, we would need a separate backend team just to deal with SSI components, and even then, it would take too long to develop.”