Building 'Trust on demand'

Recently, Kolkata police arrested a man [1]who claimed to be a doctor with fake MBBS degree. The man in question is associated with a well-known hospital in the city. The arrest has raised disturbing prospect that this fake doctor with fraudulent credentials might have treated hundreds of patients before finally getting caught by the CBI. Shockingly, he is the fifth “fake” doctor arrested by the CID in connection with a racket.

The incident raises grave concerns at the dismal state of background verification in the healthcare sector in India. While, it is often stressed that the numbers of competent doctors need to increase to tackle the country’s patient load, establishing end-to-end comprehensive trust when it comes to medical professionals still remains a matter often overlooked.

In a sector that is growing more rapidly than any other industry, it is imperative that healthcare employers exercise careful due diligence when hiring employees. The cost of trust deficit can get exceptionally high as these hires have direct interaction with the sick, elderly and infants, smooth access to controlled medications and to other sensitive information.

The conventional trust building methods simply do not work in the fast-paced, on-demand industry anymore. They are not only protracted and demand a lot of time, but also the costs involved are often way too high in relation to the expected efficiency and accuracy.

The Delhi Medical Council in between 2012 and 2015, had approached the police to register cases against 422[2] people, who are confirmed impostors and cannot practice allopathy.

However, healthcare is not the only industry in dire need of trust repair. According to AuthBridge’s annual report, the financial services Industry witnessed the highest discrepancy compared to other industries i.e., 15.38% in 2016.

Multiple facets of the banking system in India essential to facilitate quick transactions, trust-building and customer satisfaction are out of date. In our journey towards a digitally-connected India, banks and their businesses have become much more sophisticated, thus increasing the complexity of intelligence and, consequently, the demand for trust. In such a scenario, a regimented and able use of technology in verification and other processes, not only facilitates fair authentication but also reduces the overheads involved.

Some banks have already recognized the trust deficit in the industry and are adopting financial technology (fintech) to develop solutions in order to meet rising customer expectations, regulatory expectations and build trust among customers. Yes Bank, in collaboration with many fintech startups has improvised its multi-fold security layers and created innovative solutions to improve bank’s retail, SME etc. Such an approach not only facilitates quality of employees but also builds digital trust systems for better onboarding of customers.

Today, several organizations are using tech-enabled structures in order to ease their back-end operations particularly, identity verification, and have already started to experiment with behavioral biometrics, in order to[3] tighten cyber security, for a better user experience and employee verification.

One of the major roadblocks in rightful verification is that the traditional methods fail to validate trust in real-time. While the organizations assure their consumers of rigorous background checks, strict policies that ought to provide necessary safeguards, the number of incidents where one or many of their promises are broken are continually rising.

The only way to plug this gap is to make a provision for what we call ‘Trust On-Demand’. For any business, building trust in its services is critical. From a business’ perspective, trust is composed of three elements; identity, profile and reputation. Identity refers to validation of a person being who he or she claims to be; profile means validating the credentials of an individual and reputation means verification of the character of a person and his or her alignment with the organization’s values. In fact, a closer analysis of nearly every unfortunate incident involving the sharing economy start-ups reveals that one or more of these elements were ignored. At the very least, an effective check on reputation through notoriety or criminal records could have prevented many of these incidents.

Over the last couple of years, as the sharing economy has found its foothold in India, we have worked hard to create the ‘Trust-On-Demand’ infrastructure from scratch. Today, we validate ‘Identity’ instantly with an in-house proprietary platform that has access to authentic data repositories from UIDAI, NSDL and the likes.

There is a huge addressable market in India for ‘Trust-On-Demand’ infrastructure. With accelerated digitalization in the past few decades, a manual and feet-on-street process for verifying identities was neither required nor successful. Trust-On-Demand infrastructure lets the employers easily validate identities of individuals, as and when required, in a fraction of time. It is a unique offering which provides instant, error-free results, and works on the principle of as you want it, where you want it, when you want it. The competitive advantage of the entire process is that it fills in the existing gaps in the background verification industry with a high degree of technology orientation. The verification network of the Trust-On-Demand infrastructure is capable of authenticating and verifying information across vast ecosystem.