About Matrimony

Bharat Matrimony is a leading matchmaking platform based in Chennai, India. Bharat Matrimony has established itself as a dominant player in the industry with a user base of over 5 million and a range of sub-brands catering to specific segments.

However, as the company continues to grow and more people turn to online platforms for finding potential matches, maintaining the quality and authenticity of its user base has become increasingly important.

The Challenge: Onboarding Trustworthy Users and Halting Fraudulent Elements

Bharat Matrimony strives to provide a safe and effective platform for its users while also navigating the rapidly changing landscape of the online matchmaking industry.

Hence, verifying the information provided by the users is a valuable addition to the overall user base, especially female users.

“We have seen a shift happening to players adopting trust at the forefront of their business, not only at Matrimony Group but across all the players in the matchmaking and dating category. Also, regulatory bodies have come into the foray to chart how to verify users in this category specifically,” says Atul Anand, Senior Product Manager at Matrimony Group.

“Ensuring security, safety and trust were our biggest challenges. Especially for our female users, we wanted to provide a close-knit community where they can connect and interact with verified and trusted members.”

The Bharat Matrimony team identified the need to build a trusted platform early in their journey. “We identified a few cohorts of the users that are more susceptible to fraudulent activities and wanted to ensure that we can provide them a safe space to find a match,” summarized Atul.

While we all agree that verification is essential, Atul and the team also wanted to keep the user experience smooth to keep users from dropping off the platform. At the same time, the identities are to be verified for their flagship product Bharat Matrimony and their newest offering Jodi App.

The Solution: Frictionless Identity Verification and Decisioning

Verifying Identities

Bharat Matrimony leveraged Bureau’s verification suite to onboard trustworthy users in real time without any waiting around the corners.

Bharat Matrimony seamlessly captures and extracts information from ID documents via Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so users don't have to manually enter every piece of data.

The captured data is then verified directly from official sources. Any malicious user trying to onboard with fake identity information gets subjected to further checks.

On top of it, Bharat Matrimony also asks users to upload a selfie using Bureau’s Liveness Check feature. The Liveness Checks feature verifies whether the user is physically present or not.

The captured selfie is then matched with the photo extracted from the ID documents. Bureau establishes a face-match score to give Bharat Matrimony the confidence that the ID document belongs to the user.

Building Intelligence on top of Identity Verification

While individually, these signals might not make or break a user's risk profile. With added filters on top of it, these signals make a solid, fool-proof pool of verified and trustworthy identities.

These verified users are put into the prime buckets and are part of Bharat Matromomy's premium offering, “Bharat Matrimony Prime”.

“The integration experience was pretty seamless with Bureau, and we were able to get up and running with our verification suite pretty quickly,” said Atul.

The Impact

Bureau's identity verification and risk intelligence provide vital signals to Bharat Matrimony so they can confidently approve genuine users.

This led to a significant uptick in the number of verified profiles and identities. Also, Bureau established the quality and authenticity of identities in real-time with face match and liveness. Both resulted in shorter onboarding times, fewer drop-offs, and minimum fake profiles.

"These cohorts of verified identities became our go-to customers. A close community of such verified identities also gave confidence to other community members to use the platform with trust. This ensured us to keep fraudulent activities to a minimum," says Atul.

"Verified profiles, less waiting around while doing a KYC and minimum fraudulent elements sleekly transcends into a great customer experience. And that's what we are most happy about," summarized Atul.

Bureau has helped Bharat Matrimony and Jodi App onboard millions of verified users while keeping the onboarding time to a minimum. Name a better win-win situation than this.

"A few of the new intelligence we are looking to consume from Bureau are Name-Match, Alternative Data and Device Intelligence," says Atul.

Bureau's Phone-Name Match feature provides the match score between the user-submitted name and the name extracted from our telecom partner network.

"We have started running a few experiments with Bureau's Name-Match feature, which significantly contributed to our verification intelligence. The experiments outperformed our expectations. Now we are plugging Name-Match into our onboarding flow, and my whole top of the funnel will benefit from it," shared Atul.

"While Bureau suite of products has helped us a lot, I can never discount the impact of our relationship with the Bureau team. From sales and support to any hiccups and hurdles, the team was promptly available to listen to us and work on overcoming these challenges together," says Atul.

The Way Forward

As fraudsters nowadays are armed with sophisticated technologies to perpetrate malicious activities, organizations such as Bharat Matrimony must look into advanced fraud prevention tools.

In the purview of bringing trust to the matchmaking segment, Bharat Matrimony and Bureau is a perfect match in itself.

"We are looking at innovative techs such as Alternate Data and Device Intelligence. Alternate Data can further enrich our user's profile, providing vital risk assessment at every juncture, and Device Intelligence mitigates sophisticated frauds that are hard to capture merely by identity verification," concludes Atul.

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