About the company

This company specializes in retail energy sales, offering a unique software and hardware solution for face-to-face sales representatives. Designed to streamline lead management and new customer enrollment, their platform also ensures compliance with state regulations with a thorough third-party verification (TPV) process. By enhancing security and simplifying the customer experience, the company helps energy providers meet legal standards and build trust with their clients.

The challenge

A key feature of the company's software solution is third-party verification (TPV), which is required by law for energy sales in many US states. When sales representatives enroll a new customer, the enrollee must confirm the sale was authorized and that they understand the plain-English terms and conditions of the sale. The company's platform streamlines the TPV process by texting the enrollee a link to a smartphone-optimized verification platform — a far easier process than competing solutions that require a lengthy call with a live agent or a phone recording. To ensure that the confirmation link is sent to a legitimate customer and is not filled out by representatives seeking to claim commissions for enrolling non-consenting customers, the company wanted a sophisticated identity verification system. Their team designed a system with three layers of security:

• Device Verification: Ensure that the device and phone number that submitted the confirmation form is unique and legitimate using a combination of browser fingerprinting and a VOIP phone number checking service.
• Signature Verification / Biometric Analysis: Look for anomalies in submitted signatures and behavior on-page.
• Customer Positive ID: When the AI engine detects suspicious activity, ask the customer information that only they should know and verify against major credit bureaus.

When the company approached Fingerprint, the company was using another open source browser fingerprinting library for their device verification layer. The company was looking to increase the accuracy of their fingerprinting, particularly on mobile devices, as they believed most instances of fraud could be prevented at the device and phone number verification stage.

Why Fingerprint

After investigation, the company found that the Fingerprint API offered significant advantages to their previous fingerprinting solution, resulting in a more secure third-party verification process.

Higher identification accuracy for mobile devices

Many browser fingerprinting solutions struggle to accurately identify mobile visitors, as there are not enough unique signals to differentiate between users. For the company, reducing false positives was crucial to ensuring that legitimate customers could verify their enrollment quickly and easily.

For mobile devices, Fingerprint uses a combination of specialized signals to ensure the highest possible accuracy, including:

• Mobile network IP addresses analysis
• Mobile specific APIs (e.g. accelerometer)
• Mobile payment vendor information
• Mobile specific GPU signals (e.g. WebGL)

In addition to mobile browser fingerprinting, Fingerprint utilizes several server-side techniques like TLS analysis and SSL fingerprinting to increase the accuracy of visitorIDs, further reducing false positives.

Technical and Flexible Team

The company's engineering team worked closely with Fingerprint to validate performance and optimize their installation. As the company had built a sophisticated verification system, it was important that their developers had easy access to technical support.

Fingerprint offers chat, email, and by-appointment phone support for all paid plans. As a developer-first company, our in-house support team consists of engineers with deep knowledge of our product.

Key takeaways

Integrating Fingerprint allowed the company to significantly increase the accuracy of their device verification layer, especially on mobile devices. This improvement not only reduced fraudulent enrollments by 94% but also maintained a seamless experience for legitimate customers. With Fingerprint's high-accuracy identification and responsive technical support, the company strengthened its TPV system, effectively preventing fraud and exceeding compliance standards while allowing their team to deliver a smooth, user-friendly experience.