It’s all about solving customer problems directly or with partners

“We have customers in the region who buy from partners. But we're very, very clear it's the customer's choice how they wish to do it. And that's absolutely fine. We don't compete with our partners,” says Dominic Forrest, Chief Technology Officer, iProov.

As a provider of cloud-based facial biometric authentication solutions, iProov’s customers includes governments, banks, and large enterprises. The increasing challenges in authenticating have also seen an increase in their solutions being adopted and embedded into more services globally.

Some of iProov’s clients include the US Department of Homeland Security, the UK Home Office and the NHS. In Asia Pacific, iProov works with the Australian Taxation Office as well GovTech Singapore.

When it comes to working with customers around the world, Dominic Forrest, Chief Technology Officer, iProov highlighted that iProov operates two ways. The first is they can work directly with some customers while the second is working with their partners.

“Which way to operate is very largely by the customer, not by us. So, what we will not do is turn around to a customer and say, I'm not going to sell to you. And also, what we won't do is say, if you want to buy it, you must try it for us. And why is that? It's really two things. It's a pragmatic what makes sense, but also there's a lot of regulation in this space. For example, in Singapore, we have customers who are direct, and we've had customers via partners. We have no particular one way or the other. If I look at certain governments in the region, which are very much our core customer base, many of them have regulations that say they can only buy from companies which are local. So, we would have no choice but to sell to a partner,” said Forrest.

Forrest also added that in the Asian region, strong language support skills is needed which is why the culture of working with partners who can work with us is key. It also helps build that relationship.

“We have customers in the region who buy from partners. But we're very, very clear it's the customer's choice how they wish to do it. And that's absolutely fine. We don't compete with our partners. If there's a conversation where a customer comes to us, we will quite often ask them, would you prefer to do it directly or would you prefer to do it with a local company? And that's very much the customer's choice,” added Forrest.

At the same time, Forrest also mentioned that partners can either be just direct resellers or offer services alongside it. They can even build it into something that adds more value to the customer and do it that way.

“It really comes down to what is the problem the customer is trying to solve. We and the partner are there to solve the end customer's problem. We have partners who have built ourselves into their platform and they sell that platform on demand. We have a great partner, in South Africa, called iiDENTIFii, who sells to many of the South African banks. And what they've done is they've taken IAM technology, and they've integrated it in the document reading for South African identity documents, which are unique in the world. They've integrated the backing South African government Department of Homeland Affairs systems, so they can get information about the user, and they provide a KYC system to their banks. And it's a true partnership,” said Forrest.

At the end of the day, for Forest it's all about solving the customer’s problem. And this is where he believes iProov will continue to work with it partners or directly with the customer to provide them the best service possible.

“They have their ways, and whatever works for them is the way iProov works with them,” concluded Forrest.