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In this episode, I interview Johnny Ayers, CEO and Co-Founder of Socure, a leader in digital identity verification that has transformed the industry using machine learning and graph databases. From surviving a major risk event in 2014 to becoming a trusted partner for the largest financial institutions, consumer businesses, and government agencies, Socure now processes over 15 billion rows of data weekly and has verified more than 3 billion identities globally.
In this episode, we discuss:
How Socure rebuilt in 2014 and turned a near disaster into an advantage
"In 2014 all of the networks shut off access and moving from OAuth 1.0, to OAuth 2.0, they created an interesting challenge, which is they blocked public access to a lot of the data sets."
When Socure was launched over a decade ago, the company's core thesis was built around using public data from social networks to verify identities. The original idea was powerful: by analyzing a person's digital footprint across platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, they could identify real people and detect fraud more effectively than traditional methods.
Then came a major disruptive moment that nearly killed the company. In 2014, social networks began shutting down their APIs, cutting off Socure's access to critical data sources. Rather than folding, Ayers and his team rallied and pivoted their data strategy. They discovered that the elements they had been using to match profiles—device information, geolocation, address, email, phone—were highly predictive on their own. This crisis forced them to reimagine their approach to data sourcing, but this painful lesson resulted in one of their strongest strategic advantages today. Socure made the decision to bring all data in-house, now processing a staggering 15-17 billion rows of data weekly. This gives them unique control over their product and greater stability in their models and feature engineering.
"That was a multi-year journey, as a lot of modeling is, it's a lot of trial and error, it's a lot of kind of stumbling in the dark." By 2016, they had found product-market fit with their rebuilt service, starting them on a path of explosive growth that continues to this day.
Why government fraud prevention lags 15-20 years behind the private sector, costing billions to taxpayers
"Unfortunately, most of the budgets have something close to 10% of the total budget is leakage. Leakage is just fraud. So they're actually baking a very large amount of fraud into every budget."
While financial institutions and fintechs have pioneered and embraced the latest identity verification and fraud prevention tools, government agencies remain strikingly behind – it was honestly a bit shocking to hear the stats that Johnny revealed with me. Most government agencies are operating with identity verification technology that's 15-20 years behind the private sector and it’s costing tax payers a lot of money!
The consequences are staggering. Most government agencies actually budget for approximately 10% of their funds to be lost to fraud—what they clinically term "leakage." This is embarrassing. In the worst cases, Socure has even seen state unemployment agencies where 70-80% of distributed funds went to fraudsters. These aren't just numbers; they represent billions in taxpayer dollars lost to highly preventable fraud.
The challenge isn't technological—the solutions exist. The problem is implementation, politics and mindset. Many agencies are still focused on recovering funds after they've been stolen rather than preventing fraud in the first place. "We're trying really hard to get these agencies to think about prevention, like, just don't send the money to the wrong person to start."
Hopefully Socure and others can help. Socure is now working with 36 state agencies and three federal agencies, having recently received FedRAMP authorization after years of effort. They're bringing modern analytics and verification methods to a sector that desperately needs to catch up.
Johnny's strategic approach to M&A, including their acquisition of Effectiv
Johnny Ayers has one of the most strategic approaches to M&A I’ve ever heard – it extends beyond opportunistic acquisitions. Rather than pursuing deals that come across their desk from pushy bankers, he began his M&A strategy by drafting a comprehensive memo for his board outlining seven specific areas where Socure might make strategic acquisitions in the future—all aligned with their product roadmap.
This framework has guided their acquisition strategy, resulting in two full acquisitions and one acqui-hire to date. Their first acquisition, Berbix, complemented their passive identity verification capabilities with active document verification, critical for international expansion and higher-security use cases. Their second acquisition focused on mobile engineering talent to strengthen their device-to-PII connection capabilities. Most recently, Socure acquired Effectiv, a decision orchestration platform. Johnny had known Effectiv's founders, Ravi and Ritesh, for nearly a decade since their days at Simility (acquired by PayPal).
"It was just a incredible opportunity for them to accelerate commercial adoption of a best-in-class platform that had been enterprise grade from the beginning. From our side, we have 20 products where we have developed an ability to verify and risk grade every part of [an identity]. We needed an ability to orchestrate and decision."
Johnny explains that the integration has been remarkably swift. From acquisition announcement to full general availability took them less than 90 days—laser speed to those who know M&A integrations!
The future of digital identity: from biometrics to tokenized credentials and wearables
"I think as we look forward 10 years, 15 years, computers as we know it won't exist, phones as we know it won't exist."
The future of identity verification will extend far beyond incremental improvements to today's systems. While biometrics are becoming increasingly normalized in the short term, Johnny sees a more profound transformation coming in the decade ahead.
"I think you're going to see a lot more wearables," he predicts. "I think you're going to see a lot more physical pieces of hardware that are enabling how identities are verified." The smartphone as we know it may disappear entirely, replaced by embedded devices, contacts, or other wearable technology.
This hardware evolution will be paired with more sophisticated approaches to digital identity. Some form of tokenization that's going to allow the next version, the more consumer-facing, or more consumer-friendly version of pass keys.
Government partnerships will be critical to this transformation. Initiatives like mobile driver's licenses in the US and digital IDs in Europe give us window into this tokenized future, though full implementation of mobile driver's licenses might take decades, similar to the lengthy rollout of Real IDs.
While we can't know exactly what form our devices will take, Johnny is confident we're heading toward some form of tokenized credential into this future device. The end goal is a seamless, secure system that makes identity verification both more robust against fraud and more convenient for consumers.
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