Steve Craig, Director of Products & Experience for Identity at Mitek, is a product leader known for creating and executing product vision and driving technology roadmaps in entrepreneurial environments as well as in Fortune 500 companies like HP and Intuit. He joins us today to talk about Experience Design as a Service (XDaaS).
Thanks for joining me today, Steve. Please tell us about Mitek and your role there…
Happy to be here, Sean. Mitek is the global leader in mobile capture and identity verification. If you’ve ever deposited a check via your smartphone, you’ve likely used Mitek imaging technology. At Mitek, I head up our identity verification products and lead our global user experience strategy.
Yes, I’ve done a mobile deposit. Could you tell us more about how you do identify verification?
Mitek offers a suite of products that help financial institutions, insurance companies, lenders, payments platforms and any other companies that transact with consumers digitally to prove the identity of their end-users via their smartphone. Users are instructed to present their identity document like a driver’s license, identity card, or passport to their smartphone camera and our technology captures an image of the ID, extracts information from it, and detects whether it is authentic or fraudulent. We then have the user take a selfie so that our technology can match the user to the identity document and confirm the ID’s holder is present.
When would someone be presented with this experience?
It is cutting edge tech but we’re rapidly gaining traction. Most of our customers use it for new customer onboarding like opening new accounts, checking or saving accounts. Some use it for credit card or lending applications. Others use it when they need proof of identity to establish trust in a risky transaction, or for ongoing authentication.
Quite a variety of uses. I can see how your customer experience is crucial to your success. Could you tell us more about Mitek’s approach to experience design?
For Mitek products, it all starts with a great mobile capture. We provide native and mobile web software development kits (SDKs) for our enterprise customers to integrate into their apps and websites. But our service doesn’t stop once we ship software. We actively engage with our customers to ensure they are implementing best practices for document capture. In many cases, the best practice extends beyond our products so we partner with our customer to ensure success.
So in addition to products, Mitek also delivers experience design as a service. Can you give a recent example?
Sure. A top five financial institution implemented our technology in their mobile web new checking account application. They weren’t quite hitting their internal performance metric so we partnered with them to investigate. We started by making a mock site of their user interface and then ran a usability study against it to establish a baseline. From there, we learned a lot from real-world user feedback and came up with potential improvements to their baseline design. We implemented those design changes in the mock site and re-ran the study with a new set of similar users. Through the study, we learned a ton that was based on real users, not just opinion. This data allowed our customer to make changes with confidence and ultimately see lift in their metrics.
Talk about awesome service, but aren’t many of your customers already doing this?
Most of our customers are very large and very busy enterprise organizations. The teams we work with at these organizations have a never-ending backlog of work, resource constraints, and are faced with rigid deadlines. It can be very challenging to make time for user experience activities. Once new changes are deployed to an app or website, it can also be hard for them to make time for an effective build-measure-learn loop. Mitek steps in to reduce some of that burden, de-risk the decision making, and ensure success.