Trustfull: The Silent Engine Powering Real-Time Digital Trust

Welcome to a new episode of the Elevator Ventures podcast. I'm Alessandra, your host and communication manager at Elevator Ventures. I'm excited to guide you through the dynamic world of venture capital and innovation. Broadcasting from Vienna, right in the heart of Europe, let's embark on this journey together and elevate your growth.

Today our spotlight is on Trustful, the identity intelligence platform that helps businesses reduce risk, protect their integrity and accelerate growth. Join Trustful's founder and CEO, Marco Maras, and Elevator Ventures, Ivar Rakučević, in a conversation about Trustful's mission, the influence of AI, and the use of open source intelligence. Let's get started. Hi, everyone, and welcome.

Today, I'm joined by Marco, founder and CEO of Trustful, a company tackling one of the fastest evolving challenges in fintech and beyond, fraud prevention. Marco, it's a pleasure to have you with us. I would like to start with your personal journey into entrepreneurship and what led you to founding Trustful? Hi, I thank you very much for inviting me today.

Well, it started, I would say, many years ago now. I started my career as a product manager in an incubator. We were investing into companies in the Italian market. I was specifically responsible for a few of the projects back then.

Then eventually in 2005, I decided to become an entrepreneur, started up my own company in the mobile payment space, a company called OneBip. We were one of the first companies providing carrier billing, so we had agreements with the mobile network operators and were allowing people to buy things online by using their airtime. It was cutting edge back then. The company grew quite fast from zero to two million account holders globally.

It was a payment solution very popular among teenagers using airtime to buy products online, mainly around gaming. The company has been acquired in 2017 by a private equity firm, Blue Jam. After that, I had the opportunity to move into the ad tech space, help a friend of mine to start a company called DigiTouch, which was providing a wide range of, say, advertising, digital advertising services and solutions. The company eventually went public, listed in the Milan Stock Exchange, and we decided to use part of the proceeds of the IPO to start up a new company called Audience.

Audience is a customer data platform which helps companies use first-party data to optimize their marketing spend online. So I had the opportunity to basically get in touch with the use of data for that particular use case. Luckily enough, that company also has been acquired by Bungo PLC, which is a UK company. I follow up the transition for a while and then I decided to take some time off since 2020 when I started up Trustful.

That's a very, very exciting journey. And what's the original mission behind Trustful and how that vision and mission evolved as AI, new regulations, and more sophisticated fraud threats entered the picture? Yeah, I mean, Trustful, The idea of Trustful pretty much leverages a lot on my background, coming from the mobile payment space initially and then ad tech space. I saw the opportunity of using alternative data and digital signals for a more interesting use case than advertising, in my opinion, which is fraud prevention.

So I saw, you know, there's a lot of data out there that, you know, people are basically traces that people are leaving by simply providing basic information such as a mobile phone number or an email address that, you know, you can enrich by using different techniques and really understand who is behind that mobile phone, that email address or that IP address. And yeah, basically, you know, that is how the idea came up by looking at the wide range of information available using open source intelligence to prevent fraud.

Obviously in a market where unfortunately fraud is becoming more and more sophisticated I see the opportunity of modernizing that space by looking into different solutions based on open source intelligence As you said you know artificial intelligence is growing very fast. Fraudsters are exploiting this technology also to commit fraud. So staying ahead of them, it's always a challenge. And the mission that we have at Trustful is to make sure that companies can keep growing by blocking fraudsters, especially at the onboarding stage.

Yes. And in a nutshell, what is really the Trustwall offering? So, you know, our mission is to stop fraud in a frictionless way. So all of the solutions that we provide in the market are based on open source intelligence, and they are designed to help companies prevent fraud without creating a friction to the end user.

Obviously, we always say to our customers, if you block every user, eventually you will have no fraud. but that's obviously not what you want as a company. And striking that balance between growth and user experience, it's very challenging. So one of the things that we are stressing the most here at Trustful is making sure that all of the checks that we provide to our customers are silent.

They happen in the background. We're not interfering in any way in the user experience. And we want to make sure that across the different touch points of the user journey, we can help our customers prevent fraud. We know that in such an offering, you described well the silent and signal-based approach to fraud.

So I'm curious, how does it set you apart from more traditional solutions? So you have different fraud types, different situations where you can use open source intelligence and these kind of like silent digital signals. Obviously, if you look at the user journey, the moment the user lands on a web page, it creates a session already at that stage, which is a very early stage of the user journey. Trustful provides signals and information that can be used to assess the risk of that session, even before the user signups or logs into the service.

So that's one area where we can help companies is by analyzing web sessions. After that, obviously, typically every service offers sort of registration page, a signup page, whether it's a financial service, a gaming company or a travel company. Eventually, at some point, if you're selling something online, you have a signup page where users are sharing some information. So this second stage, account opening phase, is also an area where we provide a wide range of signals and scores that can help companies detect fraudulent users at that stage.

And then eventually, once the user has created an account and a legitimate user has created an account, you want to make sure that, you know, every time he authenticates and he logs into the service, he's actually the person he claims to be. So authentication and login, it's another area. Being able of covering the whole spectrum within this customer journey by providing solutions which are frictionless and easy to integrate is the challenge that we are solving. And in general, can you explain, because you're mentioning the open source intelligence, and can you explain exactly the role of open source intelligence in powering your product?

Yeah, there is a lot of public information out there. And obviously, our job is to orchestrate the complexity of gathering this information and giving a meaning to this information in a matter of seconds. So everything that we do comes from publicly available information. Obviously, you need to know where to find it, how to elaborate it, how to process it, and use it to feed an algorithm.

That's what we do. So it's not just a data play. Obviously, data is very important, don't get me wrong. But it's also being able to enrich information and use it to feed an algorithm.

So we do both things here at Trustful. So we get data from our customers, typically, you know, information such as the name of a user, the email address, the phone number, the IP address. We get these inputs We trigger a mix of AI agents and also databases that we ping And we try to understand whether this information is consistent and legitimate I'll give you a few examples. So if you provide a phone number and you're opening, for example, a bank account, and that particular phone number has been recently activated.

So it's a new SIM card, comes from a low KYC mobile operator, maybe has a very limited presence online, so this particular phone number is not associated to any messaging app, to any external service providers, or, for example, has not ever been involved in a data breach. These are all very suspicious patterns that we are able to spot in a matter of seconds and use to feed our algorithm, which eventually calculates a sort of digital score. And we do this same type of techniques and open source intelligence information we applied to other identifiers such as a user's email address or his device and browser.

The real-time risk assessment that you're mentioning is a very strong Unix selling preposition. Could you explain to us how does that really work in practice? Yes, so basically when a user lands on a web page and provides basic information such as a name or an email and a phone, we get an API call from our customers, which are sharing this information with us during the web session. At that moment in time, we trigger all our AI agents, which are crawling the web, and they're trying to find as much information as possible linked to these identifiers, gather this information within our platform, elaborate it either with rule-based algorithms or ML-based algorithms.

This is totally up to our customers and use case. And then calculate a score which ranges from zero to a thousand divided into different risk clusters. And this is essentially what we return back in the API response within a few seconds, full set of raw data that we use to calculate the score, the score indicator, and finally, the reason codes, which provide full explainability of why we believe a particular user is risky or not risky. And that is very important, especially when working with regulated businesses, providing full explainability or the score is a very important factor that we are capable of providing.

Thank you. In terms of your customers, what's the biggest advantage of this silent approach? And of course, their end users. So we are often referred as the first line of defense for our customers.

So As you know, especially in the financial world, the Ragtag space is composed of many different vendors providing different types of solutions. There are companies, identity verification providers, which are checking your documents and you have companies providing liveness checks. So there are different levels of controls that especially financial institutions are putting into place throughout the onboarding phase. What we do, it's not replacing, obviously, any of these solutions.

It's happening before they come into action. So we often are, you know, we are complementary to these providers because email, phone number, IP address, you always have it. And we strongly recommend our customers to trigger these type of checks right away because you can have early alerts of identities which could be potentially suspicious. And obviously, down the line, all those other checks around documents and liveness checks are very important.

But, you know, as the first thing, you want to make sure that the digital identity and digital information provided by the end users are legitimate. And looking ahead, we are aware that deepfakes and synthetic identities are on rise. How serious is this problem becoming from your perspective? And why do you believe Trustful is especially well positioned to tackle this problem for its clients?

That's a big issue. And obviously, these technologies are advancing. And that is why there is not a single solution to solve this problem. We are part of the solution Companies need to add as many layers of security as possible starting from digital signals but then going down the line into other more in checks The market is evolving.

There are different vendors. It is very important for companies to select companies which specialize on their field. I don't believe that a single company can cover up the full spectrum of problems with a single platform. We at Trustfuls want to make sure that we are the best in class when it comes to analyzing digital signals.

And we work in partnership with other solutions and other vendors, which are also very important to make sure that the industry is one step ahead of the fraudsters. We know that Trustful is mostly focused on the financial industry. But expanding further, which sectors you're most excited about? Yeah, I mean, obviously, financial service providers have been early adopters of our technology for regulatory purposes.

But, you know, these regulations are now expanding into new verticals. Potentially, any company will eventually be forced to run KYC checks and age verification checks. You can already see these regulations coming into the market, for example, in the UK, the UK Online Safety Act, or more generally in Europe, the Digital Services Act. These are all new regulations which are somehow asking companies also in other industries, which are not necessarily financial companies, to place the same type of controls and security checks when they are onboarding new customers.

And as a matter of fact, we are already serving companies in other industries, like in the gambling space, in the e-commerce space, in the travel space. These are all companies which are, you know, gradually adding extra level of security, either for regulatory purposes or to make sure that, you know, their transactions are safe. That's very exciting. And in terms of the roadmap for this and next year, you've set the bold goal of scaling to 100 million verifications in the course of this year still.

So how does the roadmap look like? So the way we plan to achieve this goal is basically around three key pillars, I would say. Obviously, we want to enter new markets, focusing on Europe. Currently, we are quite active in Italy, France, and Spain, but our plan is to expand in key European markets.

So adding new markets will allow us to speed up our expansion plan in terms of volumes. We want to enter new industries, as we were saying before, not just financial service providers, but entering into new verticals will allow us to expand our reach and generate more and more volumes and more verifications. And last but not least, we want to try to solve new fraud types. Currently, most of our customers are focusing on account opening protection.

But as I was saying before, you know, there are different types of frauds, account takeover, promo abuse. Being able to expand our offering and tackle these new type of frauds will allow us to reach that goal. And finally, where our audience can learn more about Trustful and its offering? Obviously, you can have a look at our website, which is www.

trustful.com. Unlike other enterprise software solutions, we offer the possibility of opening an account for free. So for those of you that have some basic technical experience, you can feel free to open an account and try it.

Great. Perfect. Marco, thanks a lot for sharing your journey and insights with us today. And to our listeners, you can explore more at Trustful.

com. and please do follow Trustful on LinkedIn for all the updates. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Elevate the Ventures podcast.

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