“Our modern identity platform provides a comprehensive portfolio of APIs that addresses all the use cases that enterprises need for security and user experience”

Starting before the point of account creation, the way customers, business partners, and other external users access digital services is often fraught with both friction and risk. For businesses, unnecessary friction translates to reduced conversion (revenue), abandoned shopping carts, frustrated users, and diminished brand loyalty. From a risk perspective, the processes and technologies enabling these identity journeys are too often fragmented and fail to provide the visibility and controls needed for security. As a result, most CIAM implementations today are custom developed. Transmit Security is on a mission to create a difference in the industry and eliminate these challenges by reinventing customer identity and access management (CIAM). The company does this by reimagining the identity experience while delivering capabilities proven to eliminate account takeover (ATO) fraud and similar risks. “Our modern identity platform provides a comprehensive portfolio of APIs that addresses all the use cases that enterprises need for security and user experience,” begins Mickey Boodaie, President and Co-Founder, Transmit Security.

Founded by Mickey Boodaie and Rakesh Loonkar, Transmit Security is built on a goal to develop a cross-channel identity platform that simplifies, accelerates, and reduces the cost of customer identity-related projects. As serial innovators and entrepreneurs, the co-founders of Transmit Security recognized that one of the main challenges facing companies, especially those in highly regulated industries, was the need to integrate and orchestrate identity journeys across a variety of authentication, know your customer (KYC), and fraud reduction systems. These include projects such as authentication, authorization, fraud prevention, account opening, and more. The platform they built significantly shortens time-to-market for customers. It allows them to manage more technologies more easily and significantly reduces integration and maintenance costs of identity-related projects. Transmit Security offers an extremely advanced orchestration technology that abstracts the entire identity ecosystem from the applications, and therefore, significantly simplifies one of the most complex IT problems there is.

Since introducing the orchestration platform, Transmit Security has helped customers such as HSBC, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Santander, TIAA, MassMutual, UBS, SunLife Financial, and many other large, security-conscious companies build seamless and secure identity journeys. In fact, Transmit Security is the only IAM vendor that was both born for CIAM and has the depth of experience needed to deliver successful solutions to the most demanding customers.

Endless Scalability, And Built-In Security Visibility

Today, security and digital product teams are plagued by too many identity products from user management to authentication to fraud and risk management to identity verification, authorization, privacy, and more. This is very expensive and results in a complex technology stack with many dependencies. Identity architectures that were built years ago face scaling challenges in terms of capacity, latency, and once again cost. Moreover, the threats to their customer and business partner accounts have skyrocketed since the pandemic began and businesses accelerated their digital services. At this juncture, Transmit Security is on a mission to consolidate CIAM use cases starting with its cutting-edge identity orchestration product - FlexID.

According to the team, enterprises face too many solutions in identity from user management to authentication to fraud and risk management to identity verification, authorization, privacy, and more. On the other hand, they had many applications that needed to work with these solutions. “We created a layer in between that orchestrates this for them. Applications get a simple API and the orchestration logic is configurable. Whereas for businesses struggling to shift to passwordless authentication, we created a service called BindID which our customers love and is based on APIs, endless scalability, and a modern tech stack,” says Boodaie.

The team also added user management, authorization, social login, account takeover prevention, and identity verification all with simple APIs, endless scalability, and built-in security visibility and controls needed for enterprise customers. Today, Transmit Security’s customers can just consume the APIs they need for their use cases, while identity and security teams have full visibility and control over security policies. This is today the most modern, comprehensive identity stack for enterprises. “In addition, we are bringing our portfolio of APIs to market in Q3 2022 via the Transmit Identity Platform. This will enable digital product teams to build secure identity journeys with less friction than ever before,” explains Boodaie. The Platform is cloud-native, building upon Transmit Security’s DNA as an identity orchestration and authentication provider. The Platform makes it easier to consume services, build and test what a business needs, and dynamically scale to handle both planned and unplanned spikes in demand that are normal in customer-facing use cases.

While explaining the value proposition of the company, Boodaei recalls an instance when the team assisted a High Street bank in London to help embrace automation and improve speed to market and streamline back-office functions. The bank was facing potential regulator fines from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) of up to 4% of revenues associated with not being compliant with the EU Payment Service Providers Directive (PSD2) requirement for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). The bank leveraged Transmit Security’s products to enhance its digital infrastructure while complying with PSD2 SCA requirements in just four months, vs. the expected time to market of 18 months. They were able to provide strong authentication across not only several websites and mobile apps, but also their interactive voice response (IVR) and call center channels. With Transmit Security, the bank retired its existing access management platform to achieve an annual savings of approximately £2 million.

A Powerful and Strategic Future

As part of its evolution plan, the company recently has started to roll out its cloud-native Transmit Identity Platform, first through the BindID passwordless authentication product. This represents the first of many capabilities from this platform, with others including a cloud-native identity provider (IDP) solution, additional authentication options, advanced fraud, and risk detection, identity proofing, and more. These will be available via developer-friendly APIs and SDKs, so that product teams can build the unique, branded experiences they need for their customers and business partners.

Since its inception in 2004, Transmit Security has been empowering digital leaders and product teams to build secure identity journeys for their customers, business partners, gig workers, citizens, or other external users who aren’t coming in from a human resources-initiated. The company has been profitable and cash-flow positive from its earliest days and has been able to invest heavily into R&D. Indeed, R&D and customer support were almost its exclusive focus areas up until recently. One of its more exciting developments is the Transmit Security Research Team. This team has been performing applied research on digital fraud, focusing on the methods that attackers use to overcome protection schemes. They have already identified a half dozen techniques and developed methods of detection and protection. Unlike most companies, Transmit Security’s innovation is almost entirely developed internally. “We possess some of the most talented cybersecurity and cloud platform developers in the world. Many of our teams, including our security researchers, have military intelligence backgrounds and the experience to understand our customers’ digital adversaries, from organized crime to state actors. Security is in our DNA, and it pervades everything we build and operate,” points Boodaie.

Furthermore, the company already has a strong foothold in most major markets: North America, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia Pacific (including Japan). “We will continue to grow in those markets, both through employee growth and by adding to our partner ecosystem. The expansion of our cloud-native Transmit Identity Platform is where our roadmap is now focused. We will be announcing new capabilities every quarter starting in the second half of this year,” he concludes.