Persona Launches Know Your Seller (KYS) Solution to Help Marketplaces Comply with INFORM Consumers Act

Industry-first solution integrates KYB with bank account verification, streamlining
a resource-intensive, error-prone compliance challenge

SAN FRANCISCO, May 16, 2023  /PRNewswire/ -- Persona today launched a know your seller (KYS) solution designed to help marketplace businesses comply with the INFORM Consumers Act,  bipartisan legislation passed to combat global marketplace fraud last estimated to exceed $500 billion annually¹. KYS was purpose-built for marketplaces on top of Persona's automated know your business (KYB) solution launched last June. With enhanced features for bank account verification, KYS is uniquely positioned to help marketplaces save time and reduce errors when onboarding sellers based anywhere.

Expected to go into effect on June 27, 2023, the INFORM Consumers Act was developed to protect buyers from companies and individuals engaging in the sale of counterfeit or stolen goods. The legislation requires online marketplaces to collect and verify the contact information, bank account details, and tax identification number for "high-volume" vendors who complete more than 200 transactions or bring in at least $5,000 in gross revenues annually. Failure to comply can result in fines of $46,000 per violation. Penalties for non-compliance and the looming deadline have created an urgent need for an automated verification solution that doesn't inadvertently harm the seller experience.

"What's unique about the INFORM Consumers Act is that it requires marketplaces to both quickly verify high-volume sellers and also welcome those who may meet that threshold later. It's a delicate balance to strike in ensuring good sellers don't encounter friction too early and bad actors are discovered quickly," said Jeff Sakasegawa, Trust and Safety Architect at Persona. "That's what makes Persona's KYS solution so unique. By automating extremely manual, complex, and error-prone processes, Persona not only helps marketplaces comply with the INFORM Consumer Act, but also enables them to enhance trust and deepen competitive differentiation."

With Persona's enhanced KYS solution, marketplaces can:

• Quickly comply with the INFORM Consumers Act without engineering or product resources: Instantly verify (or reverify) a seller without having to manually look up information or maintain your own integrations and contracts with disparate data sources. To meet the new bank account verification requirement, Persona has partnered with leading financial platform MX Technologies, Inc., a leader in Open Finance, to offer a native integration. An out-of-the-box configuration designed for the INFORM Consumers Act means marketplaces can meet compliance requirements in days, rather than months, with minimal engineering resources.
• Onboard, verify, and reverify more sellers throughout their life cycle with seamless flows and automatic decisions: Deploy seamless, automated KYS flows at any point in the seller's customer journey, whether it be during onboarding, when sellers hit the transaction threshold, or during annual due diligence. With Persona's automated verifications, sellers only need to go through one flow and instantly receive decisions, minimizing drop-off.
• Easily grow and move into new markets: By uniting bank account verification with other KYB and KYC verifications, the Persona platform enables marketplaces to optimize and automate their seller onboarding and screening process for future growth or new markets.
• Leverage Persona's system of record to minimize friction and maintain a robust audit trail: With all seller data in a single, auditable identity system of record, marketplaces can conditionally minimize friction while meeting INFORM Consumers Act requirements by automatically checking reverification against previous attempts and tailoring requirements based on configurable risk factors.
• Find and block hidden fraud rings with a consolidated platform: With all seller data in one place, marketplaces can also surface hidden links among sellers on their platform to catch sophisticated fraud rings and automatically block them via the built-in powers of Graph, Persona's fraud-fighting engine launched earlier this year. 

Many leading marketplaces already use Persona to automate their KYC and KYB processes, including Discogs, Outdoorsy, and Sonder, businesses focused on music, recreational vehicles, and hospitality, respectively.

ABOUT PERSONA

Persona offers a unified identity platform that gives businesses the building blocks they need to securely collect, verify, manage, and make decisions about individuals' and businesses' identities—along with automation and orchestration tools to streamline the entire process from end to end. 

Founded in 2018, Persona is headquartered in San Francisco and is available in 200+ countries and territories and 20 different languages. Persona serves  any business that needs to verify its customers online, including retail, fintech, marketplace, delivery services, real estate and hospitality, HR, edtech, legal services, home and childcare services, and more. For additional information, please visit https://withpersona.com/

¹ Department of Homeland Security, Dec. 31, 2020, Stopping Counterfeit Trafficking on E-Commerce Platforms through Fines and Civil Penalties

SOURCE Persona