Remote is a leading HR tech platform and provider of global employer of record services and international contractor management. Remote empowers companies of all sizes to hire the best talent anywhere, taking care of the legal complexities of managing international payroll, benefits, taxes, stock options, and compliance.
Problem: Remote needed a better way to verify each employee and contractor it helps onboard.
As an Employer of Record (EOR), Remote needs to ensure every employee and contractor it onboards is actually who they say they are. “In every country, you need to have valid documents to be employed legally,” explains Alex Lazarevic, a senior manager of customer success at Remote. “We need to confirm that the person completing the Remote profile is the same person from the documents they’re submitting — and that the documents are valid. This is a crucial part of the process. If we cannot confirm this, we cannot move forward with employment.”
While Remote originally manually verified each person’s identity, it knew this wasn’t scalable. “We have a lot of employees we need to KYC. This isn’t something anyone should be doing manually in terms of workload,” Alex adds.
Solution: Remote uses Persona to automate KYC for employees and contractors worldwide.
To future-proof its business and ability to scale, Remote decided to look for a tool that would automate the identity verification process. It ultimately chose Persona for the following reasons:
Worldwide coverage
Remote has one major theme scattered throughout its site: global HR, international payroll, in every continent. Its goal is simple: help companies compliantly hire contractors and employees all over the world. “Today, many businesses are looking to hire talent outside of the country where they have a business entity,” says Bridget Levac, a senior product manager at Remote. “Many people are looking for gainful, credible employment and a reliable paycheck, and employers are recognizing there’s talent all over the world.”
As Remote serves employees and contractors in 150+ countries — and is rapidly expanding — it needed its identity verification partner to be able to verify individuals all around the world. With coverage spanning across 200+ countries and territories and availability in 20 different languages, Persona fit the bill. “Being able to capture a very wide audience was a really important factor in our search for an IDV vendor,” Alex adds.
User experience
While staying compliant and fighting fraud are priorities for Remote, one of its biggest goals is to help companies “compliantly hire employees and contractors with speed and delight,” Bridget explains.
A company’s onboarding experience is one of the earliest ways to impress (or disappoint) a new hire, so Remote knew the identity verification process needed to be as seamless as possible. “The onboarding phase for employees and contractors is very sensitive. Everybody wants to wrap it up and finish it quickly,” Alex says.
At Persona, our automated identity verification allows individuals to prove their identity in seconds, and we designed our platform with end-users in mind — making it convenient to switch between devices, providing live guidance, and using auto-capture to make the process as easy as possible.
For Remote, this was one of Persona’s key differentiators. “Success in my role means everything works correctly and we don't have a lot of friction,” Alex continues. “Persona works on most platforms and devices without an issue, and compared to the software that I've used in the past, it’s more user-friendly. It’s very easy for employees to go through the process.”
Credibility
Workers aren’t the only ones Remote wants to make happy — it also cares about the companies it serves.
Adding a trusted partner like Persona to its tech stack shows the companies Remote serves that it takes the identity verification aspect of onboarding seriously. “By adding in Persona’s checks, our credibility and compliance went way up — as well as our speed,” says Bridget.
Why? Because “Persona is a completely objective tool we can use to communicate potential issues with our clients,” explains Alex. “Most of our clients are very happy to hear that this is part of the check and we’re doing everything we can to ensure everything goes according to law — that we don't let anything slip through the cracks. Persona really helps us keep things in check, helps us be more efficient, and gives us the scalability to move quickly.”
Partnership
As identity verification is such a key aspect of onboarding, Remote also knew it wanted a partner that’d be easy to collaborate with. Persona offers companies a designated customer success manager and support team, and like many others, Remote has been impressed by our partnership.
“We have great support from Persona,” says Alex. “Any questions we have are answered super fast, and anything we ask for is either addressed as product feedback or something that already exists. We’re able to move fast with Persona, which is important for us.”
Bridget also appreciates our openness, calling working with Persona “a collaborative and transparent experience.”
A variety of powerful but user-friendly tools to streamline identity operations — all on one platform
For Remote, one of the most helpful aspects about Persona is the fact that we offer a holistic identity infrastructure — not just a one-off identity verification tool. This allows Remote to handle all of their identity-related needs on one platform. In addition to our Verifications product, Remote also uses:
- Cases to streamline one-off manual reviews and communication between its compliance and user happiness teams. “If there are any flags, the user happiness team creates a ticket internally for the compliance team to review,” explains Nauman Abuzar, a compliance analyst at Remote. “Cases helps streamline the operations behind the scenes.”
- Workflows to easily automate manual processes. “There are certain scenarios that we want to prevent and certain scenarios that require a more in-depth review,” shares Alex. “In some cases, it makes sense to bypass the automatic process, so we use Workflows to automatically flag potential issues that we should review manually.”
- Dashboard to review inquiries, set up automated decisioning rules, and more. “Our team does surface-level checks on Persona’s Dashboard to confirm if everything is okay,” Alex shares. “The Dashboard is simple to use — we don't need a complicated training for our team members to be able to dive in and start using it. Nobody’s complained that it's too difficult or too complex.”
To Alex, who has tried out multiple identity verification platforms throughout his career, Persona’s holistic toolkit is one of the things that sets us apart. “So far Persona has been the most complete. Things are working really well,” he says.
Results: Remote automates 93% of its verification process and proactively fights fraud with Persona.
With the help of Persona’s vast array of tools, Remote automates 93% of its verification process, ensuring workers get verified as quickly and compliantly as possible.
As a bonus, while Remote originally partnered with Persona for KYC, it was pleasantly surprised when we built our fraud-discovery tool, Graph.
With Graph, Remote can detect duplicate accounts and investigate potential fraud by finding and visualizing groups of accounts connected by common properties. “Graph has really brought a lot to the table in terms of assessing the risk for different scenarios,” Alex shares. “Now, we can look at the bigger picture and identify potential threats that would be virtually impossible to detect if we only looked at individual verifications.”
Thanks to Persona, Remote can now take a more active approach to fraud instead of simply reacting to one-off instances. “With Graph, we can dive in to see the connections and get ahead of the curve. Persona’s tools have really helped us become more proactive in fighting fraud.”
