3 Reasons Dating Platforms Need a Holistic Approach to Identity Verification

Trust is the foundation for every online dating platform. People come to your platform to meet other honest people, not scammers, and certainly not bots. At the same time, add identity verification checks can frustrate new users and drive them to competing platforms.

After trying different approaches, many dating apps find that a holistic identity verification platform is the most effective way to balance safety and user experience. Here’s how it works.

You Don’t Want to Treat Every Person the Same

Every user and interaction carries a different level of risk. Some individuals are brand new to your platform. Others are long-time members suddenly engaging in unusual behavior.

A holistic approach allows you to segment users based on risk and adjust your verification requests accordingly.

For example, when onboarding a new user, you can collect passive signals behind the scenes, such as their device fingerprint and behavioral signals. Each of these can help you make an informed decision without adding friction.

You could automatically let low-risk users through without any additional request. But if something looks amiss, you could step them up and require an additional verification request, such as a government ID or selfie check.

You Can’t Rely on a Single Identity Check

A holistic identity verification system takes a layered, end-to-end approach to confirming that an individual is who they claim to be. There are often:

• Multiple signals in each layer: You can collect and analyze passive, behavioral, and active signals during each flow to make better-informed decisions.
• Multiple verification points for each user: You can run or rerun verification requests throughout the customer life cycle.
• The multi-pronged strategy can increase accuracy and help you flag potentially suspicious users and patterns that might not be visible in isolation.

Persona discusses this approach in depth in its strategic guide to balancing risk and conversion. The guide offers real-world examples of how to segment users by risk level and configure your onboarding accordingly.

You Need a System That Scales

Your team shouldn’t have to choose between catching bad actors and growing your legitimate user base.

Whether you’re onboarding a new user or helping a user recover their account, collecting different signals and automating the user’s next step can reduce risk without overwhelming your internal teams.

After working with Persona to automate its identity verification process, Coffee Meets Bagel reduced its average user verification time by 99.9%. It also decreased its human moderation costs by almost 30%.

Holistic Protection Creates Trusted, User-Friendly Platforms

As fraudsters and scammers use new tactics and technology, including generative AI, the online dating industry has to evolve to stay ahead. Legacy verification systems won’t keep up, and treating identity as a regulatory checkbox could hurt your reputation, users, and revenue.

A holistic strategy helps you stay ahead. You can dynamically verify users, build safer communities, and even offer verified profile badges or premium features to boost engagement. Most importantly, you show your users that safety is part of the experience.

Kerwell Liao is a seasoned product marketing and user experience leader with over a decade of experience shaping identity, security, and user-centric solutions at some of the world’s most influential tech companies. Currently serving as a Product Marketing Manager at Persona, Kerwell drives go-to-market strategy for Persona’s highly configurable identity verification and fraud prevention products