The Revenue Expansion with Veriff [REV] marks the company’s transition from a largely direct model, and is designed around accommodating flexibility in partner business models.
Manuel Solis III, Head of Global Partnerships & Alliances at Veriff
Online identity verification vendor Veriff has sold direct for much of its life, but is now looking to scale their business significantly with the introduction of their new R.E.V. [Revenue Expansion with Veriff] Partner Program. The program, the company’s first, is designed to provide a clear path to support the ecosystem of partners that Veriff intends to develop. It will support them in sales and marketing, and provide them with Veriff’s premium IDV platform to help meet the demands of end customers desiring to combat identity theft and fraud.
Veriff has been around since 2015, and is focused around identity verification, which is a very different type of business from the identity and access management that is likely more familiar to many channel players.
“We validate the authenticity of the documents used to provide evidence of identity, like passports, and drivers licenses, and compare them to a live version of the person that’s in front of the camera,” said Manuel Solis III, Head of Global Partnerships & Alliances at Veriff. We have been able to expand and support the various types of documents. The breadth of documents that we support is second to none – over 10,000 types of unique types of documents globally.”
The channel is a relatively new add-on for Veriff, but is already doing a significant amount of business for them.
“We started off as a direct model, but the majority of successful SaaS companies, while also starting out direct, have added a partnership arm, to the point where 80-90% of their revenues are now typically driven. At this stage of our development, this was the perfect time to bring this in. This is Veriff’s first shot at an official program. It has been in the labs being developed, around discussions between myself and the sales organization.
Solis said there is broad buy-in at Veriff around how the channel and channel strategy will fit.
“The foundation is really the people at Veriff and the program is more of a formality,” he stated. Every one believes in the same vision and strategy, that it needs to be a force for good for our partners, and lets them drive business the way they want to for themselves
Even though Veriff is only launching their formal channel program now, a significant minority of their business is touched in some way by partners.
“It is a significant weight,” Solis said. “A good 40% of targets are weighted in the success of this program and our team.”
While the channel is still in its early stages of development, Veriff has identified three types of buckets as particularly good fits for them.
“We are essentially looking at three types of partners,” Solis said. “One is OEM and technology partners, who typically integrate our technology into theirs, and white label it. One is traditional resellers. The third is influencers and referrals. We have a good handful of partners in each bucket and are continually building pipeline with these partners.”
The core philosophy of the R.E.V program is its flexibility in allowing partners to integrate, white label, resell, refer, implement – or do any combination of these, depending on the business opportunity, at any scale.
“We have allowed ourselves to be flexible,” Solis emphasized. “One size fits all is never really successful. Our program is based on allowing a partner to come to us and tell us what their business goals and objectives are, and then designing a revenue plan that best fits their model.”
Solis that the ISVs are part of the main channel program for these same reasons.
“We brought ISVs into the same fold, because it allows us to not reinvent the wheel,” he said. “We know that they aren’t going to train all their people on your product. If there is no monetary tie to their wallet, they will forget about you tomorrow. By embedding them naturally and presenting them with high level talking points, its an easy way to drive demand for business. It fulfills our goal of being more sticky with OEMs.”
The program is being rolled out in stages, with certification likely to be the last.
“LMS [Learning Management Systems] are usually the last thing implemented,” Solis said. “It’s absolutely something that we will be providing to the partner community, and we are looking at the best ways to enable our partners around this. Some LMS systems are great and successful and some ride into the sunset. No one wants to sit through 42 modules to become certified, so we are looking at unique ways to provide enablement.”
