Checkout.com to acquire French identity verification startup ubble

In an effort to expand its financial services offerings, Checkout.com has shared its intent to acquire the French digital identity verification startup ubble. 

The acquisition would let the global cloud-based payments provider expand its current range of financial products to fintechs and e-commerce merchants that help manage the financial risk of online payments.

The deal is slated to close later this year pending regulatory appeal and comes as the volume of online transactions around the world continues to grow alongside the increased risk of fraud and money laundering.

Just months ago, the decacorn raised $1bn to pursue a web3 strategy. 

“We always put the needs of our merchants first,” Checkout.com chief product officer Meron Colbeci said.

 “By expanding our security and fraud detection capabilities, we can reduce the time, cost and friction those merchants experience with existing [identity verification] solutions. And they can offer their end consumers a simple and compelling experience, which lends itself to increased conversion rates and faster growth.”

In addition to helping to verify customer identification, the capabilities should also ensure merchants and fintechs are compliant with local regulators and stay ahead of any potential regulatory changes.

“We were impressed with the ubble team, their ability to rapidly drive machine-learning innovation in a complex and challenging space, and their market-leading engineering talent,” Colbeci said.

“By partnering more closely, we can significantly accelerate their already ambitious roadmap and bring the benefit of their cutting-edge technology to our thriving ecosystem of merchants.”

Co-founded in 2018 by CEO François Wyss, CTO Nicolas Debernardi and chief marketing officer Juliette Delanoe, ubble is a remote, real-time, video-based identity verification service.

It has almost 100 people employed in its French offices and uses machine learning solutions to enable the automated verification of a user’s identity for more than 2000 types of documents from more than 200 countries and territories. 

“For the past four years our team has worked to build a technology foundation that establishes trust between online services and their users, and respects and protects the privacy of identity data across the board,” Wyss said. 

“With today’s exciting news, we can increase the velocity of our [identity verification] innovation journey, help to evolve the Checkout.com payments technology stack even further, and amplify and extend our collective reach and benefit to merchants around the world.”