Building a fintech makes you think carefully about the person on the other side of the screen. Someone wants to open an account, move money or run a business. They have a reason for being there. You want to help them get on with it.

You also have a responsibility to know who they are, understand the risks and protect the service they are trusting you to run.

We felt both responsibilities while building our fintech. We wanted to make something people could rely on. Along the way, we ran into a problem that became the starting point for Toden: fragmented verification, fraud and compliance tools.

The work between the checks

There are good tools for checking an identity document. There are tools for verifying a business, screening a name and assessing fraud risk. A team still has to connect those checks to a customer's journey and decide what happens next.

Who needs to review an uncertain result? What information should that person see? How does their decision reach the application? What should happen when another signal arrives after onboarding?

These questions sit between engineering, operations and compliance. Each check may have an answer, while the team still needs a complete picture of the customer.

Our experience made us pay attention to those connections. A successful API response is one step in a much longer responsibility.

Keeping the person in view

It is easy to talk about onboarding as a conversion funnel. For the person trying to use a financial product, it is a moment of trust.

They have shared something personal. They may have photographed a document, taken a selfie or supplied information about their business. The next screen should help them understand where they stand and what they need to do.

The people operating the service need that clarity too. A reviewer should be able to understand why a case needs attention. A developer needs to know which result is final and which work is still pending. A compliance team needs a record it can follow.

Those are the kinds of questions we wanted to design around. We care about the person waiting for an answer and the team responsible for giving one.

Why we built Toden

We built Toden to connect customer verification and the work that follows it.

Teams can verify people and businesses, screen sanctions and watchlists, assess risk, monitor activity, and investigate alerts through an API and dashboard. Configurable workflows connect the steps. SDKs and hosted links provide ways to collect information, and signed webhooks bring results back to an application.

The aim is to give teams a connected record they can use from onboarding through ongoing review. The business still owns its policies and decisions. Software should make those decisions easier to understand and carry out.

We also wanted developers to have room to test. Toden has a free sandbox, with pay-per-check production pricing. Teams can explore the developer resources before deciding whether it fits their product.

What we would ask before another integration

Our experience changed the questions we ask when evaluating these tools:

• Can we follow one customer across verification, review and later activity?
• Can a reviewer see the evidence and understand why a case needs attention?
• What happens when a result is delayed, a request is retried or a person needs to step in?
• Can we test those situations before customers depend on the integration?
• Can we explain the next step clearly to the customer?

Those questions are useful whether a team chooses Toden or another approach. They help turn a collection of checks into a process people can operate with care.

Building for the teams doing the work

Toden grew out of the experience of building a fintech and wanting the tools around it to fit together better.

We know how much care goes into a financial product. The interface people see rests on decisions, checks and responsibilities they may never see. We want to help the teams carrying that responsibility build with greater clarity.

That is the work ahead of us. We are sharing what we build and listening to the people connecting these systems in their own products.

If fragmented verification, fraud and compliance tools are part of your working day, we would like to hear which connection causes you the most difficulty.

Explore Toden, or reach the team at hello@toden.co.