Identitech – The world’s most user friendly due diligence platform

One of the UK’s most exciting technology companies

It’s estimated that 24% of all registered businesses in the UK have a need for some sort of due diligence or regulatory compliance. Meaning that almost a quarter of British companies need to confirm the identities of their customers before they can begin working with them.

Most of us have been through the hassle of sending off our passport or driving licence, scanning our utility bills and sharing our address history, it’s a tedious process. Because of this, most professional and financial service providers are waiting days, if not weeks, to fully onboard their customers. This is where Identitech comes in.

The Identitech platform cuts down customer onboarding and anti-money laundering processes, from weeks to just a few minutes. This is all done using mobile technology with no apps or complicated logins required.

We’re proud to have helped launch Identitech; researching, designing and developing both its software and also its website and digital assets. Here’s the story of how we birthed one of the UK’s most exciting technology companies.

The best results begin with research

From the very creation of Identitech, the pursuit of building a truly innovative tech company meant that pretty much everything would be uncharted territory. Of course, the best approach to uncharted territory is to first understand if Identitech’s grand plans would be viable in the real world.

Kicking off our journey we first delved into market research and carried out viability studies. This research would focus on two main areas: the extent of the problem that Identitech was looking to solve, and the technical viability of the product that would be built (would it even be possible to achieve?).

The results were fascinating. When we carry out any research at Illustrate Digital, our goal is to give confidence to decision makers, along with all of the data to make firm calls on direction and strategy. That’s exactly what was achieved for Identitech. Before laying a finger on any design or code, we would already understand the real scope of the market, with a strong assurance for the future of this exciting tech brand.

A world-class user experience

The number one selling point for Identitech is its unmatched user experience. 

We knew heading into this project that Identitech’s brand would live or die on exceeding the industry standard for UX, and raising the bar for financial and professional service platforms. Bringing to life our FinTech and wider technology experience, this would be a perfect match for the brilliant UX design team at Illustrate Digital.

Having already learned from our research of the customer, and the end-user frustrations felt across the industry, we were armed with plenty of understanding in how to create a greater experience.

Starting with basic wireframes to explore and test the best approach, we were able to make decisions about the best direction for the user journey. As much as it’s tempting to make this sound super fancy, it’s not rocket science. But basic human science does play a part here – we put into practice everything we know about what people naturally expect and how their intuitions react when using a digital experience.

Once we’d iterated and agreed on the basic journey, full prototypes and user interface design could take the lead. This would bring the platform to life and mimic the real-world application as closely as possible, helping to make informed decisions about the direction of their technology. 

With this agreed, it was time to get technical!

Using WordPress to prototype at speed

If you’ve browsed our website for even a few seconds you’ll know how excited and expressive we are about the potential of WordPress as a brilliantly versatile development tool.

When it came to prototyping early versions of Identitech’s technology, WordPress was an absolute no-brainer.

We needed to test the potential of a number of different data providers. The data sources would allow us to pull vital background information from the likes of Experian, the electoral roll, international sanctions lists and other checks to understand people’s identity profiles.

The core features of WordPress – posts, pages, user management and the REST API – lined up perfectly with the requirements for testing these data sources and how they would play with the user journey we sketched out.

WordPress proved to be a brilliant playground for testing and breaking as many things as we needed to before agreeing on the best way to build the Identitech application from the ground up. We’re ecstatic that it’s played a big role in creating the technology that exists at Identitech today.

Collaborating to engineer two identity applications

What happens when you take a brilliantly versatile team of PHP and JavaScript engineers and ask them to develop something that’s never been done before? You’d maybe guess it makes for very interesting and rewarding work, and you’d be right!

Identitech is made up of two applications, connected by a pretty elastic infrastructure. The main application (focused around Laravel) powers all of the back-end experience, allowing businesses to create and manage the identity checks they’ve requested from their customers and clients. The front-end (focused around Vue.js), is a finely tuned experience that collects the customer data really quickly and intuitively.

In everything we’ve planned and developed alongside the Identitech team, it’s been super important to make sure our approach is modular, flexible and ready for future platform growth. 

Launching a new instance of the software to a new Identitech customer is quick, simple and secure. Launching new features to all Identitech customers is a breeze, and the Identitech team’s devops experience has been essential to achieving this.

What’s Next for Identitech and Illustrate Digital?

It’s been a privilege to help Identitech build a team and head on with continually developing its software. As a tech team, we’ve handed over the growth and development of the software platform to Identitech, whilst continuing to look after their website and the WordPress side of the infrastructure.

What’s critical to help Identitech to stay ahead, is the involvement of our UX experts. With a big feature roadmap and the pursuit of providing the quickest, slickest user experience, we continue to support the product development. This involves UX consultation and advice, as well as ongoing UI design for new features.

Identitech has big plans and a brilliant product that adds tremendous value to financial and professional service businesses. So watch this space and check out their website to understand more about what they do and the impact it can truly have versus the traditional due diligence process.