Crypto Exchange Coinbase to Use Machine Learning for Customer ID Verification
The demand for Cryptocurrencies increased exponentially over the past few months and exchanges have not been able to keep up with the demand. Some exchanges have entirely stopped new user sign-ups. One of the biggest exchanges of them all, Coinbase, has also faced many issues and admitted poor customer experience for verification in a blog post .
Here’s a chart compiled by a twitter user showing Coinbase’s growth over the past few years.
The chart has not been updated since November 2017 because the company no longer provides the info. But one look at the chart should give you an idea of the demand for Cryptocurrencies in the last quarter of 2017. At its peak, Coinbase was adding 100,000 users a day.
Last year, Coinbase reportedly hit $1 Billion in revenue and the company’s valuation has doubled from $1.6 Billion in August. The company is being constantly pinged by investors to sell their shares and the demand is high since the company does not allow stakeholders to sell their holding on secondary markets.
But not everything has been going in Coinbase’s way in the last few months. Just yesterday, the company admitted to handling the Credit Card fees applied by banks poorly. Some banks have been billing Coinbase customers with ‘Advance Cash’ which comes with additional charges. The company has now included a disclaimer asking customers to switch to a Debit Card or Bank Account to avoid these fees.
Last week, the company announced the hiring of Hiriji from TD Ameritrade to improve Customer Service which has also been lacking heavily for the past few months.
Most exchanges have a customer verification process, and so does Coinbase. The company could not verify identities as fast as users were signing up, which resulted in a lot of unhappy first-time users.
To fix this, Coinbase has replaced the identity verification system in place with a newer one which makes use of Machine Learning. Coinbase claims that the new system in place can successfully verify nearly 90% of all Customer IDs.
CoinBase also said that they’ve signed up with a new ID verification vendor to help balance the load during peak periods. However, this new vendor was not named in the blog post.
Also, Coinbase claims for the remaining 10% of the IDs that fail to register, most of the times it is an issue with the ID uploaded. The ID Verification system will not be able to verify if the verification uploaded is Cropped, low-res or blurry.
Previously in such instances, customers had to contact the customer-support and have their problem fixed which takes time. With the new system in place, when an ID verification fails, Coinbase will send out an automated mail to the customer on why the verification failed and specific solutions to fix it.
The new verification is already live on the website, and mobile apps will be updated in the coming weeks. One look at Coinbase’s Reddit Page has so many complaints about people having a bad experience with the verification system. Hopefully, the new verification system in place fixes those concerns.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
