Editors’ Note

Carey Kolaja served as the Global Chief Product Officer at Citi Fintech and Vice President of Global Consumer Products at PayPal. She was honored as one of the Most Influential Women in Payments in 2021 by PaymentsSource and named one of the Top 10 Women in FinTech of 2020 by FinTech Magazine and Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology of 2019 by The Financial Technology Report, and among the 10 Most Innovative CEOs in Banking 2016 by Bank Innovation. She was also recognized on the 2016 Power List for Global Women in FinTech. In 2015, Kolaja was named one of the 20 Most Influential Women in Payments by PaymentsSource and was recognized by Innotribe as one of the leading Women in Fintech bridging the gender gap. She also received PYMNTS’ “Woman in Payments to Watch” Innovator award, honoring those who have shaped the payments industry, and Fortune 500 Next Generation of Female Talent for 2015 and 2014. Kolaja earned a BS from the University of Indiana Business School and is an executive program graduate from Stanford University.

Company Brief

AU10TIX (au10tix.com) is an identity intelligence company with the mission of ending fraud and making the world more secure with forensic grade technology that links physical and digital identities. Over the last decade, AU10TIX has defined the way global enterprises automate customer onboarding and ongoing customer verification through cutting-edge machine learning and computer vision, enabling companies to onboard faster, prevent fraud, meet compliance mandates, and establish trust with their customers. Headquartered in Israel, AU10TIX is a subsidiary of ICTS International N.V.

Will you provide an overview of AU10TIX’s business and where you see the greatest opportunities for growth?

AU10TIX is a game-changing identity intelligence company on a mission to obliterate fraud, enable business to provide safer services, promote trust and seamlessly secure our everyday access to life, work and play. We use groundbreaking technologies to provide automated solutions that link physical and digital identities, verifying who people say they are with speed and scale. Our ambition is to harness the power of our identities to further a more secure and inclusive world.

Over the past decade, AU10TIX has defined the way global enterprises automate customer onboarding and customer reverification through cutting-edge machine learning that enables companies to onboard faster, prevent fraud, meet compliance mandates and establish trust with their customers. The company’s proprietary technology, unlike traditional, semi-manual identity verification solutions, returns identity verification results in a matter of seconds, safely meeting the real-time demands of today’s world of physical-digital transactions.

As the sophistication and agility of fraudsters has greatly accelerated due to widespread, rapid digitization spurred by the pandemic, the greatest opportunity we see for growth is in combatting the explosion in synthetic fraud. Fraudsters are using this emerging technique to create complete, convincing identities that bypass existing fraud detection by collecting breadcrumbs of information people leave online – date of birth, Social Security number, medical history, financial information – and assembling them together with fake information. The costs to businesses are significant: Aite Group estimated synthetic fraud-related losses of up to $1.2 billion by the end of 2020, while others predict losses as high as $8 billion.

When the pandemic drove digital interactions to historic highs overnight, it also drove synthetic fraud. Further, The Economist notes COVID-19 has led to a 75 percent increase in daily digital crime, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports a 300 percent increase. In response, we accelerated the launch of INSTINCT, an anonymous platform designed to unify the business community around global identity signals that can fight synthetic identity fraud. INSTINCT is aimed at detecting criminal attempts to create multiple accounts using fraudulent ID credentials that have already penetrated the service provider’s system. Such attacks may be carried out using same “cleared” credentials (“Clones”), or such submitted with slight alterations (“Mutants”).

This innovative networked approach builds on AU10TIX’s globally trusted identity verification solution and has helped our customers discover suspicious patterns and anomalies in historical and emerging datasets. INSTINCT can operate within a single “node” or across “nodes” as part of a global consortium. The interest and impact have been overwhelming and we are projecting to have 30–50 million identities flow through the platform within its first year. Within this autonomous ecosystem, our customers and businesses are keeping one another safe, preventing fraud-related expenses and headaches when business continuity is the priority and peace-of-mind is truly priceless.

Who is the AU10TIX customer and how broad is the target market?

The global identity verification market size is expected to reach $17.8 billion by 2026. According to a recent report by global investment firm William Blair which named AU10TIX’s identity management platform as the “broadest” and “most automated” in the market, businesses must adapt to the post-pandemic reality in which the safety, security and efficiency of physical and digital experiences are inherently connected to people’s identities. The response to the current pandemic, and the preparation for the next one, has brought digital identity to the top of the strategic agenda for individuals, businesses and governments alike. Fueled by the immediate need to adapt to unprecedented change in customer behavior and market risks, businesses are increasingly turning to AU10TIX for our innovative identity intelligence solutions. We work with customers across financial services, retail, the sharing economy, mobility services, healthcare and education by providing critical, modular solutions to link physical and digital identities that enable them to confidently connect with their customers.

How critical has it been to attract and retain top talent for AU10TIX and what do you see as the keys to effective leadership?

For the last 12 years, I’ve worked and led remotely across five different time zones and 12 countries. My experience at different companies, in various roles, repeatedly building high-performing organizations, required me to find a way in which we can work in a distributed environment. This experience has made me accustomed to leading teams remotely and serves as validation that, as leaders, we don’t have to limit ourselves and the talent we hire based on physical proximity. Rather, we can hire for the best talent in the world to solve the challenges in front of us today. I look for people who possess a certain set of attributes, such as an appreciation for thinking and acting globally, intellectual curiosity, creative and critical thinking, a change agent mentality, and grit. My role models taught me that you don’t ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself and rolling up my sleeves and doing the work is as important as leading the work. People who can learn, adapt and maneuver across not just time zones, but also different cultures, are those who will thrive at AU10TIX. We are truly diverse.

Cultivating and keeping talent, particularly in such an unpredictable environment, is finding the balance between being an empathetic leader while growing a company that is adapting as continuously as the fraud we prevent. Trust is the foundation of creativity and productivity. If people don’t feel secure, then they aren’t able to reach their highest potential. While many trusted leaders value this idea, each of us has a few key leadership philosophies that we live by to help it manifest in our organizations. In my role at AU10TIX, I am focused first on radical transparency. On my team, the only conversations that are off-limits to broader audiences are around personal performance. We need to be able to have a healthy debate and to stand behind our positions without being judged for having a contrarian point of view.

My second focus is on a “High Say/Do Ratio,” fostering a workforce that does what it says it will do so that everyone feels accountable to one another and can trust each other to follow through.

Finally, we need to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Vulnerability, particularly during COVID when for the first time in society we are all going through the same experience, offers leaders the opportunity to show themselves to their team on a deeply authentic level.