Whitepages Pro, a leading supplier in global digital identity verification data, today announced that has spun off its renamed business-to-business (B2B) division from the US-focused direct-to-consumer operations of Whitepages.com. Whitepages Pro will change its name to Ekata to better differentiate the company’s global B2B APIs and SaaS tool that serve the growing worldwide need for identity verification.
“Our new brand and independent operations reflect the integral role we play in helping many of the world’s biggest digital commerce businesses find digital identity that links back to real a human,” said Ekata CEO Rob Eleveld. “Top brands in ecommerce, marketplaces, payments, and online lending leverage our identity verification product suite in their machine learning models, risk-decisioning platforms and for their manual review teams.”
New brands, but continued growth
As of June 1, 2019, the newly branded Ekata unit began operating independently. The underlying stakes of existing private investors in both companies were not significantly impacted by the split since the Whitepages.com was not publicly traded.
The separation of the two businesses is intended to allow both to focus on executing their independent growth strategies. Whitepages.com and Ekata both expect to add on net new positions in the coming months. For Ekata, there are a whole slew of job openings in all three of its offices in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Seattle.
Silence from global market competitors
Neither of Ekata’s largest identity data provider competitors, Emailage and PIPL, responded to the strategy shift by the market leader ahead of the official announcement. It is unclear at the moment, what the ramifications are for solution end-users outside the North American American and the impact it will have on the price and quality of competitors solution offerings.
This global identity verification market is projected by McKinsey to reach $20 billion in 2022. To further these efforts, the business opened a new headquarters for European operations earlier this year in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. This effort will support sales, account management and marketing efforts in the (Europe, Middle East and Africa) EMEA region.
“Cross-border risk management is our focus,” says Ekata EMEA VP Spencer McLain. “Our customers in the EMEA region tell us all the time that finding quality data in some markets is virtually impossible.”
“The more markets our customers needs to assess risk in, the more value we provide,” McLain added,
Businesses around the world including Alipay, Microsoft, Stripe, and Airbnb, already use parts of the Ekata suite to increase approvals of more good transactions, reduce customer friction, and find fraud Our European presence is built to serve the needs of the European markets, as well as markets other North American businesses are expanding their global reach into,”said Eleveld.
Ekata Identity Engine
The Ekata Identity Engine (EIE), which powers the identity verification suite, includes Ekata’s:
- Proprietary network – Monitoring linkages and associations across billions of data elements to identify real-time predictable patterns that correspond to the behavior of genuine customers versus those of fraudulent actors. Transaction queries are analyzed through complex machine learning algorithms that derive unique velocity, popularity, and volatility features to improve product performance by maximizing the benefit in resources saved.
- Global graph – The EIE houses more than 8 billion identity links that provide unparalleled global coverage and accuracy. From more than 50 authoritative sources, Ekata uses sophisticated data science to curate and corroborate the links between email, phone, name (person or business), physical address and IP to connect digital and physical identity attributes together.
- Connective Ingestion Generation Acceleration (IGA) stack – Delivers the most predictive attributes of end clients to customers in less than 100 milliseconds. It leverages proprietary ingestion, generation and acceleration processes to enable a single global endpoint and improve the speed and quality of responses.
Whitepages, Inc. itself was founded by Alex Algard in 1997, It has offered consumer and business solutions for digital contact and identity data for more than 25 years. Both Whitepages.com and Ekata will maintain their Seattle headquarters as they each focus on building the next-generation of solutions for their respective consumer and business audiences.
Ekata’s solutions help businesses grow and scale revenue by maximizing the predictability of good transactions. From pre-authorization payment models through to manual review, the Ekata identity verification product suite is powered by Ekata Identity Engine (EIE), the first cross-border identity data engine of its kind.
Customers can select from Ekata’s powerful APIs for models and decisioning platforms or Pro Insight, a SaaS solution for manual review. All are powered by the EIE, which delivers performance that can meet the most demanding requirements, including collecting and clustering identity data in under 100 milliseconds to improve machine learning (ML) model performance.
