GuyID combines IDV with reputation for online dating

Ravi Shankar wants you to trust him. The founder of Ottawa-based startup GuyID is combining identity verification with vouching in a new model that provides so-called trust cards for online daters – “kind of a business card, but for dating.”

“When you look at the dating space, you can see a lot of catfishing happening, a lot of scams, a lot of spam, a lot of identity fraud,” Shankar says in an interview with Biometric Update. The clutter leads to a bad experience, which leads to low approval ratings for apps.

Coming from a data background, Shankar set out to determine what data was available in the online dating world – and develop a way to make friction sexy. “My experience with general marketplace analytics is, so if you want to be a successful marketplace business, the more friction that you have at onboarding, the better quality supply or demand that you’re going to get.”

While many industries see friction as a deterrent to efficiency, volume and scale, for online dating, it’s a different story: friction, Shankar says, signals intent.

“If you have more friction, then you can slowly start eliminating someone who’s not too much into dating, or they’re already in a relationship, they’re married, they’re being secretive and things like that.” The juice is only worth the squeeze for people who really want to use the service.

Hence his plan. GuyID combines identity verification from third-party provider Didit with voluntary information that serves to replace the informal background check many daters already do themselves: social media searches, reverse-image searches, and so on. Shankar says “GuyID exists to replace that fragmented, ad hoc process with a consent-based system where the evidence is shared directly by the person being verified, rather than reconstructed by the person doing the research.”

Another key is to reject aggregate trust scores in favor of a model that lets individual trust signals speak for themselves. Per the company’s product briefing, “a verified badge means a provider approved a session tied to an account – not that the person is safe or background-checked.” Combining vouches, profiles and IDV into a single number “flattened” the person behind the digital identity.

In dating, transparency is key. Shankar believes society is experiencing an “introvert pandemic.”

“People have lost trust with respect to dating. Now is the time that dating has to be more transparent. The ideology of GuyID is to have a pool of green flags and eliminate all the red flags.”

The core idea is to prioritize qualitative data that leads to higher success rates for matching. And the ultimate goal goes some way to explaining the product’s name. Slowly, he says,  “conversion rates are going to become much better, people are going to be much more trustful. And if you’re able to capture the female audience – if the female audience trusts this product –  that’s enough because they control the market.”

If ladies no longer want just a guy, but a GuyID, “that’s success, for me.”

Article Topics

background checks  |  Didit  |  digital ID  |  digital trust  |  GuyID  |  identity verification  |  identity vouching  |  startup