there are multiple addresses for one identity, or the Social Security number doesn’t match the applicant’s date of birth. “If the information is being manipulated and used on a continual basis, we can see it because we are looking across all these companies where these attacks are going on, where one company wouldn’t see it. So that was the germ of the idea, and that ID score was a very successful product.”
After commercializing their ID Network in 2003 (which made ID Analytics an early entrant among companies providing software as a service), Hansen says, “We were selling ID scores to everybody. All the big players weighed in, and of course, the more companies that participated, the better the product worked because the more data we’d get, and the better the product worked, and the better the product worked, the more clients we got. So we kept going around in this virtuous cycle. By 2006, it was pretty clear that we had a winner on our hands.”
Hansen says he’s precluded from naming his customers, but they include the top five credit card issuers, top four wireless carriers, auto lenders, and other big companies.
Yet ID Analytics also began searching in 2006 for ways to diversify its business beyond its one core product. “We built this more ambitious growth strategy to build a whole series of solutions around the network and analytics,” Hansen says. “We also raised $20 million in venture capital to fund that expansion plan. We closed it in May of ’07, and we were glad in ’08 that we did that when we did.”
As a result, Hansen says, “We had enough momentum through these growth initiatives that we grew right through ’08, ’09, and 2010”—despite the disastrous effects of the subprime mortgage crisis on Wall Street. “We grew 25 to 30 percent a year in each one of those years.”
One part of the strategy was to use the company’s database and analytics capabilities to help lenders make better
