Persona rolls out Know Your Seller solution

KYS was purpose-built for marketplaces on top of Persona's automated Know Your Business (KYB) solution launched in June 2022. With augmented features for bank account verification, KYS is positioned to help marketplaces save time and reduce errors when onboarding sellers based anywhere.

The role of the INFORM Consumers Act

Expected to go into effect on 27 June 2023, the INFORM Consumers Act was developed to protect buyers from companies and individuals engaging in the sale of counterfeit or stolen goods. The legislation requires online marketplaces to collect and verify the contact information, bank account details, and tax identification number for ‘high-volume’ vendors who complete more than 200 transactions or bring in at least USD 5,000 in gross revenues annually. Failure to comply can result in fines of USD 46,000 per violation. Penalties for non-compliance and the looming deadline have created an urgent need for an automated verification solution that doesn't inadvertently harm the seller experience.

Executives from Persona explained that what's unique about the INFORM Consumers Act is that it requires marketplaces to both quickly verify high-volume sellers and also welcome those who may meet that threshold later. It's a delicate balance to strike in ensuring good sellers don't encounter friction too early and bad actors are discovered quickly. That's what makes Persona's KYS solution so unique. By automating extremely manual, complex, and error-prone processes, Persona not only helps marketplaces comply with the INFORM Consumer Act, but also enables them to enhance trust and deepen competitive differentiation.

With Persona's enhanced KYS solution, marketplaces can:

• Quickly comply with the INFORM Consumers Act without engineering or product resources: Instantly verify (or reverify) a seller without having to manually look up information or maintain own integrations and contracts with disparate data sources. To meet the new bank account verification requirement, Persona has partnered with financial platform MX Technologies, a player in Open Finance, to offer a native integration;

• Onboard, verify, and reverify more sellers throughout their life cycle with seamless flows and automatic decisions: Deploy seamless, automated KYS flows at any point in the seller's customer journey, whether it be during onboarding, when sellers hit the transaction threshold, or during annual due diligence. With Persona's automated verifications, sellers only need to go through one flow and instantly receive decisions, minimising drop-off;

• Easily grow and move into new markets: By uniting bank account verification with other KYB and KYC verifications, the Persona platform enables marketplaces to optimise and automate their seller onboarding and screening process for future growth or new markets;

• Leverage Persona's system of record to minimise friction and maintain a robust audit trail: With all seller data in a single, auditable identity system of record, marketplaces can conditionally minimise friction while meeting INFORM Consumers Act requirements by automatically checking reverification against previous attempts and tailoring requirements based on configurable risk factors.

• Find and block hidden fraud rings with a consolidated platform: With all seller data in one place, marketplaces can also surface hidden links among sellers on their platform to catch sophisticated fraud rings and automatically block them via the built-in powers of Graph, Persona's fraud-fighting engine launched earlier this year.

Marketplaces that already use Persona to automate their KYC and KYB processes, include Discogs, Outdoorsy, and Sonder, businesses focused on music, recreational vehicles, and hospitality, respectively.