Robust Identity Verification with Intellicheck and Zuplo

Hey there! I head up engineering here at Tuo.

We are building a platform for lenders to have turn-key execution on their lending products. For a lender to deliver successful lending products, they need to have several things in place such as compliance management, automated underwriting, collections, and risk management. There are some fantastic providers that have made it their business to focus on each of these areas. At Tuo, we partner with them to bring it all under one roof for our clients.

I’d like to higlight two of our partners: Intellicheck and Zuplo. The flexibility and robustness in each offering has turbocharged our ability to bring value to our clients.

Why We Chose Intellicheck

Choosing Intellicheck was a strategic decision driven by several key factors that align with our commitment to providing top-notch identity verification solutions:

1. Proven Accuracy:

   • Intellicheck’s track record for delivering highly accurate identity verification reduces the risk of fraud, which is crucial for our clients in the financial sector.

2. Regulatory Compliance:

   • The platform ensures compliance with stringent regulatory requirements, providing peace of mind to our clients who must adhere to these standards.

3. Real-Time Verification:

   • The ability to perform real-time identity checks allows our clients to make swift, informed decisions, enhancing their operational efficiency.

4. Seamless Integration:

   • Intellicheck’s robust API made it straightforward for us to adapt our own API on top, allowing for a smooth and efficient integration process. This minimized disruption and ensured a seamless transition for our clients.

5. Scalability and Security:

   • As our clients grow, Intellicheck’s scalable solutions can accommodate increased demand. Additionally, their focus on security with advanced encryption and data protection measures ensures sensitive information is safeguarded.

Considerations with Intellicheck

1. Complexity:
   • Intellicheck offers a wide range of customization on their API endpoints. While we appreciate it on our team and it allows us to fine-tune responses for clients, it is a bit of a learning curve.
2. Response Encryption:
   • The Base64-encoded response and signature is slightly inconvenient to work with. We wrote a custom policy to streamline this for our clients.

By partnering with Intellicheck, we empower our clients with reliable, efficient, and secure identity verification capabilities, enabling them to focus on their core business operations with confidence.

Why We Chose Zuplo

As a small fintech company, Tuo needs to be both scrappy and rigorous in our approach to building and managing APIs. When evaluating Zuplo against other API proxies, we considered several key factors that align with our needs:

1. Customizability:

   • Zuplo’s ability to let us write custom policies in TypeScript was a game-changer. This flexibility allows us to tailor our API interactions precisely to our needs, which is crucial for maintaining control over our API’s interface.

2. Scalability:

   • With CloudFlare backing Zuplo, we benefit from geographic distribution and optimized caching. This ensures that as we grow, our API can handle increased traffic without compromising performance.

3. Security:

   • Security is non-negotiable in the financial tech space. Zuplo provides SOC2 compliance, HTTPS by default and robust out-of-the-box API key management.

4. Developer Experience:

   • The developer-friendly nature of Zuplo, with features like GitHub integration and a cloud-based IDE, deployed environments, and documentation portal streamlines our development process.

5. Cost-Effectiveness:

   • Zuplo’s pricing model is flexible, enabling us to start small and scale as we grow.

Considerations with Zuplo

1. Learning Curve:

   • While the ability to write custom policies is powerful, it does require our team to be proficient in TypeScript. For us it’s a great fit.

2. Feature Set:

   • So far, we have been very pleased with the feature set. Other providers collectively have some features that Zuplo doesn’t: automated API versioning and lifecycle management, non-HTTP protocol support such as SOAP, multicloud support, and fine-tuned monetization. We haven’t needed any of those.

Comparison with Other API Proxies

• AWS API Gateway:

  • Pros: Offers deep integration with AWS services, which is great if you’re already in the AWS ecosystem.
  • Cons: Its complexity can be overwhelming for a small team like ours, especially if we’re not fully embedded in AWS.

• Apigee:

  • Pros: Provides comprehensive API management and strong analytics.
  • Cons: The cost and complexity can be prohibitive for a startup, making it less appealing for Tuo.

• Kong:

  • Pros: As an open-source solution, Kong is highly customizable.
  • Cons: It requires more setup and maintenance, which can stretch our limited resources.

• NGINX:

  • Pros: Known for high performance and being lightweight.
  • Cons: It lacks the API management features we need, which are critical for our operations.

Zuplo aligns well with Tuo’s needs. It lets us move fast and yet maintain a rigorous security practice and a high level of control over our API’s interface. Plus the folks at Zuplo are just great! Friendly, fast with feedback, and they’re always making their product better.

How Our Clients Benefit

For lenders, identity verification is a crucial part of fraud prevention, compliance, and risk management. We teamed up with Intellicheck because they’re pros at this. However, we wanted to keep control over our API’s interface. We used Zuplo to build a proxy that could handle the heavy lifting, and it has been a perfect fit for us.

Our clients can leverage the power of Intellicheck’s identity verification while maintaing a consistent interface with our other offerings. We make it easier to integrate, as we strive to deliver on our promise of launching lending products in weeks, not months. We added streamlined rate-limiting, authorization, request validation, response serialization, and monitoring on top of the Intellicheck API.

Zuplo has enabled us to build a robust, scalable, and secure API that our clients can rely on. Big kudos to our partners. Without them we could not deliver lending solutions as efficiently as we do.