Identity & Access Management , Security Operations

Socure to Fortify Identity Services With $136M Effectiv Buy

Effectiv's 30-Person Team to Streamline Identity Services, Help Socure Grow Revenue
Socure to Fortify Identity Services With $136M Effectiv Buy
Johnny Ayers, founder and CEO, Socure (Image: Socure)

Socure plans to purchase a risk decisioning startup led by a former PayPal and Google employee to optimize identity verification and onboarding processes across the customer life cycle.

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The Lake Tahoe, Nev.-area digital identity verification firm said its proposed $136 million acquisition of San Francisco-based Effectiv will bring enterprise-grade tools to Socure's platform while accelerating revenue growth and enhancing customer experience. CEO Johnny Ayers said the company is building out workflows to simplify processes for customers and reduce the need for complex engineering.

"I looked at about 50 different companies across the space to buy or license," Ayers said. "You have a lot of lipstick on a pig with pretty front ends, but they're just not architecturally well-designed underneath the hood, which means they can't do complex aggregations. They can't do complex compute. They can't really scale to enterprise requirements because they weren't architected correctly from the beginning."

Effectiv, founded in 2021, employs less than 30 people and completed a $9 million seed funding round in July 2023 led by Better Tomorrow Ventures. The company has been led since inception by Ravi Sandepudi, who was previously PayPal's director of product development and Google's manager of trust and safety. Sandepudi will become Socure's head of platform products once the deal closes on Nov. 1 (see: Socure Buys Berbix for $70M to Fortify Identity Verification).

How Effectiv Will Help Streamline Identity Verification

Effectiv's enterprise-grade technology is capable of orchestrating across products and building complex step-wise computational sets that direct specific reactions based on the initial action taken, Ayers said. The deal will make it easier for Socure to support customers across their entire life cycle, moving beyond account opening to address identity verification during login, payments or authentication, Ayers said.

"We have something like 45 different combinations of SKUs that a customer can consume from us," Ayers said. "As we've built out more and more capabilities, we were increasingly getting more and more asks to be able to orchestrate across these products."

The integration of Effectiv into Socure will happen in two main phases, with the short-term goal of service integration expected to happen within the next 45 days. From there, Effectiv will transition from Google Cloud to AWS and integrate its branding with Socure. Within the next year, he wants to achieve full parity in infrastructure by aligning cloud services, dashboards, user access and case management systems.

"Phase two, where there's basically no space between our two teams or companies, will take about 12 months," Ayers said.

The technical integration involves creating various workflows that will streamline customer and business onboarding, as well as transaction monitoring, Ayers said. The goal is to develop pre-built templates and flows for easy integration by clients without requiring complex engineering. These workflows will also simplify authentication, account recovery, and onboarding processes to streamline implementation.

"There are hundreds of rules that are running concurrently to basically look at whether or not to approve a transaction," Ayers said. "Some of the things that they're building right now are going to enable us, effectively, out-of-the-box, to take our best-in-class solutions and then plug them into these different workflows to solve these different pain points across the customer life cycle."

How Existing Socure Customers Will Benefit From Effectiv

Customizing and integrating various security and identity verification tools into customer onboarding flows, transaction monitoring, and know-your-customer processes will optimize complex workflows and improve security protocols across business and individual customer life cycles.

Socure's existing customers will benefit from faster access to joint services within 45 days as well as a full experience improvement within 12 months, he said. This includes dashboard integration, user access management and faster time-to-revenue for customer integrations. Long term, customers will have a unified platform experience, with improvements in user experience and infrastructure parity, he said.

"That benefit to the customer is you're going to have one dashboard, one super admin, one case manager, and all the UX and design is going to be perfectly, fully integrated," Ayers said. "There's going to be one cloud provider. All the things that really move the needle - services and functionality - existing customers are going to be able to have by the end of this year."

Acquiring Effectiv is expected to allow Socure to triple platform revenue, reduce the time required for new integrations by 90%, and increase deal size by 15%, according to Ayers. He anticipates the deal will help Socure improve retention rates and reduce time to value for new customers. Operational synergies, such as consolidating dashboards and case management systems, will also yield long-term cost savings.

"We anticipate about a 15% increase in deal size, because there's more capabilities that the average customer is going to be consuming from us with each new deployment," Ayers said. "There's synergies around not supporting two dashboards and not supporting two case management systems. But the majority of the deal is about accelerating revenue growth and accelerating profitable revenue growth."


About the Author

Michael Novinson

Michael Novinson

Managing Editor, Business, ISMG

Novinson is responsible for covering the vendor and technology landscape. Prior to joining ISMG, he spent four and a half years covering all the major cybersecurity vendors at CRN, with a focus on their programs and offerings for IT service providers. He was recognized for his breaking news coverage of the August 2019 coordinated ransomware attack against local governments in Texas as well as for his continued reporting around the SolarWinds hack in late 2020 and early 2021.




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