The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 235 Verifer.io Jori Falkstedt CEO

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

Verifer.io Jori Falkstedt CEO

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com thechrisvossshow.com Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. You guys are the most best audience in the world. So, anyway, be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors,

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Also, you can go to YouTube.com. Of course, that's Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button to get all the notifications and see, of course, all the different product reviews we do there and the puppy videos of Rocky Raccoon the Husky. So that's on there as well. Anyway, we've got a international star with us today, Jory Falkstead. And Jory is the CEO of Verifier.io. We're going to be talking about cryptocurrency today.

So this is going to be really good for our cryptocurrency fans. He's been a serial entrepreneur. He's founded several companies since 1997. Most of them are still running with over 40 employees in Finland, Estonia, China, and the Philippines. Boy, the world sure gets smaller, doesn't it? He is the chairman of the board at J2P2 Invest, OI, and of course now Verifier.io. Welcome the show jory how are you today nice nice thank you nice to be here with you chris awesome so you're uh the ceo of this company verifier and look it looks like you've done a lot of things around the world and everything else you've got a lot of experience in this cryptocurrency field tell us a little bit

about yourself and give us maybe some plugs where people can look you up on the internet. Yeah, thanks. So we have been in the crypto space just about two years. But four years before that, we have actually made the same business. So as you know, we are doing the different investigations and verification for the companies and persons. And at the moment, we are focusing to know your customer, KYC, and also anti-money laundering, AML, and political explicit person verifications, PAP. So this is really something in crypto space at the moment.

Yeah. So this is pretty amazing what you guys have got going on. You guys have got basically, I guess, with Verifier.io, what sort of pain do you guys resolve? What do you guys do there as a global player? Well, when the money is now moving around the world all the time, faster and faster, and the countries are tightening the regulations of the money transferring, so somebody has to process the things that they are going right so that's why

we are we are we are doing to the kyc is more and more and also emls more and more more almost daily so in the past we did more more company compliance checkups and also we check backgrounds of the of the factories but now in the last six months it has totally changed to the smaller kyc and and aml verifications so uh when you say aml pep and kyc those are compliance uh verifications i guess yeah yeah yeah they are there's different regulations in different countries and and actually actually the price for the house coopers once did a kind of instruction how the KYC have to be done in different countries and that instruction contains 671 pages so it's it's not that easy than people think that it's not only to check the passport and or the driving license. Wow that's pretty amazing.

Yeah so the KYC globally is very difficult and need a lot of know-how how to do it and I think we are the first one who have also automated that. So we have programmed all these laws to our platform, and the platform can follow the regulations globally automatically. Wow. So if I want to send cryptocurrency across, I guess for business purposes, this is mostly what it's for, personal purposes, I guess, I've got to make sure that I'm following all the laws and rules of each country. Otherwise, it could be violating them.

And I, and I guess right now with crypto currency still being in this sort of pioneer version, a lot of countries haven't either adopted the laws or their regulatory kind of tight or over controlling because, you know, people are still figuring this stuff out and getting, and I'm sure governments are still trying to understand it

and pass the proper laws to make it something that can freely move from one point to another. Yeah, yeah. And the regulations are coming more and more all the time. And like USA and Europe have made a lot of new regulations this year. So because the whole crypto space have to be in kind of wild west last the last one and a half year yeah it's definitely been the wild west i know um i know a lot of different things i mean for a while their cryptocurrency was really really

wild west and then uh then we started seeing a lot of regulations and banks banning people that were using cryptocurrency. I know at one time, people that were trying to use cryptocurrency were getting kicked off of PayPal. And then more and more as the awareness got out there and the banks had to realize that this currency was going to become a new thing and they just had to adopt to it instead of trying to ban it and and make it uh illegal um you know you can't you can't fight change you can't fight what's coming that's vanity as they would say um so you know more and more now that we've seen the building of like legitimate exchanges i know the know the one twin brothers have done their exchange, and we're seeing more and more of the legitimizing

and making sure that the systems are in place. And I'm sure you're a big part of that with what Verifier.io is doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what prompted you to start this? What was your motivation behind this? Actually, we did two company verifications in the past. And actually, my little brother was working in the internet casino and asked why we don't do also the KYCs and AML verifications.

And at that time, time everybody done all those manually so they check the passports and check the invoices and so on and it takes like half a year when we started to do it and it was growing quite

fastly so maybe first three months we make 300 pieces of KYC's and next three month we made 1,300 pieces so it was it was going fast like upwards mm-hmm so those all this is the reason reason because of course we have to we have to follow where the money is. So that's where we are going. Yeah, so what a lot of people, I guess, don't know is with banking, there's anti-money laundering specialists that have to do examination tests to detect people that are doing money laundering,

maybe illegal stuff going on, violations of... I know that the U.S. has certain Russia things blocked and you're not supposed to transfer money with certain Russians or whatever the U.S. government does. I know banks have kind of the same thing where they can get in trouble if they're money laundering for, say, I don't know, drug dealers and stuff like that. And the PEP is a financial institutions thing where they're required to perform due diligence in transactions involving politically exposed person.

That's kind of interesting. How does that work? Yeah, for example, the political exposed persons cannot, usually they cannot gamble so for example in in beginning of this week we made the contract with a Asian Poker Federation so that Asian Poker Federation is controlling the two poker tournaments and online poker around in 14 countries in the Asia. Now we are the official partners of them. Those guys also like to know if there is political explicit persons playing around. Yeah.

Is that a big European thing or is that an international sort of law thing? Yeah, it's international. International law. Yeah. See, this gets into a lot of different areas that a lot of people aren't aware of and, and how things work and what goes down with these money transfers. It's a big deal because,

um, you know, it's, it's, you've got to make sure that you're, you know, not breaking any laws, you're not breaking any,

uh, you know, us government. I imagine every country has got when they do, uh, when they do when they ban certain people like Russians and things like that that the US does you got to make sure you don't break those laws or else then you're in trouble with that country yeah yeah big about crypto space like ICOs if the ICOs are not

handling the AML and KYC correctly it's very difficult to if they can raise some money it's very difficult to change it in fiat fiat money after the ico has end so i have been speaking i have been speaking with uh many exchanges crypto exchanges and most because we have the ico as well so most of them are demanding that the kyc and aml aml have to be done correctly otherwise they are not allowing those those icos to change their money so it's very important also also for the for the startup companies who are making the icos most definitely the i mean they've got a... So what would you say your largest client base is or who are your clients,

not specifically in name, but what sort of industries? Are ICOs, I suppose, your clients? What other gambling sites would be your clients, I think? The internet casinos are the biggest industry of our customers. But the crypto space is something that I strongly believe is going to be bigger than the casinos. Because that space is growing very fast.

And also the regulations are following that so fast that I'm sure that the AML and KYC is going to be a very important part of crypto space. Most definitely, most definitely. Yeah, because crypto space is so global. For example, if you play in the casino in Malta, you are usually a European player. But if you invest to ICO, you can be wherever. So KYC and AML have to be done following both countries, you and the company you are investing for. Yeah, it's an interesting world out there.

I mean, this cryptocurrency, it would be nice if eventually everyone could have the same laws and agree to some sort of international scale this, but we're probably years away from that, if at all, because I know the EU likes to do things their way, and America likes to do things their way. I'm sure China's got some real stuff going on with cryptocurrency. They seem to be trying to do a lot of controlling of it over there in China, don't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah China's controlling very very strictly and at the moment we don't have any Chinese customers but but I just came from the Asian tour and I have been I have been speaking with the with the many

potential customers but inside inside of China and inside of of Asia there's no, the KYC and AML is not so strongly demanded. And if we speak about between China and other countries, like from Europe or from USA, they usually don't even allow to to make investment or get investments so so at this point the the AML and KYC between China and Europe or USA is not so big thing but for sure it will be yeah I mean it's I there has to be these things in place because most banks have to adhere to this sort of thing so any transfer of any type of money, you know, do this, whatever. And I'm sure they don't want to see more exchanges like, I forget the big drug exchange that was really huge early on. What was the name of that one?

The Dread Roberts, Dread Pirate Roberts guy was running. It became this huge drug cryptocurrency exchange uh and i forget the name of it but i'm sure they don't want that happening again with more of those exchanges or not exchanges but more of those sites that that are doing that and basically do basically

they were kind of uh not really moneylining but drug dealing off of their off their website um and i'm sure they want to take and regulate that so they don't have more of that stuff going on. Yeah, and also all the exchanges are now very serious. Because I have been investing in the ICOs and cryptocurrencies by myself for a long time also. So I have seen that the way how the exchanges are working has totally moved forward. And they are very serious exchanges,

most of the biggest ones. Yeah, they're not kidding around anymore with how things are going. It's reaching a point I'm sure where, you know, it's something that's very valid. So the best way they can do to use your services is, I guess, contact you guys on your website, take a look at some of the different products you guys offer in KYC, AML, PEP, compliance, ICO verification program. What does the ICO verification program do? Yeah. In the beginning of this year, we published the ICO verification program.

It was because there were so many ICOs who actually were scams or wasn't so serious companies. So we created the way to make sure that the ICO is compliant and everything around the ICO is just like they write in the white paper and the team is correct and so on. And from the beginning, this was quite a big business. It was growing like we get every day many orders but in last month the icos has has not raised money so well anymore and and also there's many many many small icos came and i think at the moment the icos are not not ready to spend

money new icos are not ready to spend money at all for those so that's why we have been focusing now to our platform which is actually quite fancy i think it's the most most advanced in the world at the moment wow wow yeah um it's it's you know there there is a lot of different uh fraud that's been going on with the icos uh there's a lot of i mean i think there's just piles and piles of dead ICO things that have been issued, lots of different people that have been ripped off. I recently saw a scam artist who did some callback that was pretty evil. And yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty wild westy, some of the stuff that's out there. So I can see the value of an ICO verification program.

This is kind of interesting. Buy and sell investigations you guys do. Verifier as a subcontractor, company, product background researches. You guys have about eight years of experience in examining the background of companies, suppliers, and ICOs. So you can get a complete report of your desired company or supplier. You're supposed to find out how legitimate they are and all that sort of good stuff. Yeah, we have done these company checkups for a long time.

For example, the store and sell the company investigations means that, because in the past we did lots of... I have owned the importing company investigations means that because in the past we did lots of i have owned the importing company i have i was importing of of precast raton and simplicity and snapper so on so we had to do a lot of investigations for the factories mostly in china and and also we bought these investigations that the factories are correct and they are not just tolling our money. We bought them from the other service providers. And in 2012, I established my own company to make these company background checkups. And we also started to sell those checkups to the other customers and the thing was that for example I have a good example a

few years ago we made the investigation to the Nuan Mar, there was a customer in Florida who was buying the teak, the wood from the Nuan Mar and the teak is very highly regulated and it have to be it have to be grown exactly how it should be or otherwise the buyer is also in the big problems he get offer for the very cheap cheap teak and ask us to go and check up if the is the the the the seller is okay it was indian seller but selling the teak from the Myanmar. And we make the investigation, takes like two weeks, we visit there, two guys visit there and we check that all and the customer was

happy. But after that we were thinking that actually what we just done, we spent two weeks, two guys to make this investigation which was extremely expensive and now there's nobody who can buy this same information again so we decided to make the platform that if you buy this kind of investigation for example that guy who bought the Teak background check, now he can sell the same information to the other customers who will need it. For example, some shipyards are using a lot of Teak and now that guy knows that this Teak is cheaper than the other ones and quality is good enough so they can sell it and this process selling and buying and changing the prices of this data It's very easy to process by the cryptocurrency Mm-hmm. So this is amazing. Yeah, this is kind of second thing what we are doing But at the moment the the the 95% of the turnover is coming from the from the small

Verifications, but for sure we are doing that we are doing that platform also that's wild i mean yeah you gotta these days it's it's hard to see who's on the other side especially when you're doing cryptocurrency you just don't know what's going to come out the other side or or um you know how it's going to turn out or who you're doing business with there's and stuff so yeah you definitely got to know what's going on and who it's going on with. So that's very important. So anyone who's in the cryptocurrency space,

be sure to check out his site. It's verifier.io. That's correct? Yeah, yeah, verifier.io. Go check out his website and be sure to contact Jory. Ask him if you have any questions. I'm sure you can talk to him or his staff. Anything else we should know, Jory, as we wrap up the show?

Yeah, I'd just like to explain a little bit about the platform we have created this year. Okay. Because every time when there's somewhere with customers and money, there also will be competition. And we decided to make the platform to help our verifiers to process that whole process as fast as possible. And that's why we create the platform which have very very nice few advantages for example we have when the customer is downloading the passport or utility bill or driving license it automatically check the image pixel by pixel and and it and it's detecting if the photo is manipulated.

So for example, if somebody is trying to manipulate the utility bill or driving license by Photoshop, the program will automatically see that. So even the law says, in many countries the law is that these documents have to be checked manually. We are still doing that manually, but for sure this automation is much better and faster than the human eyes. And the second thing is that the automation in following regulations. So for example, if you have ICO in Australia and investor is from USA and the Australian ICO wants to make the KYC or AML because the investor makes so big investment,

our platform automatically follows the regulations of Australia but also the USA. So every different customer has a different looking page depending on which country they are and the system is always following the law. So our clients can be 100% sure that the procedure is made exactly under the laws what they have to be done. Because sometimes, for example, if your ICO is in the USA, the regulations

KYC regulations are quite light in the USA. But the same thing in Europe it's much tighter so if the the process is bought from us the the regulations are followed automatically in both countries so the ICO have never problems with a AML or KYC they always safe and also the speed is now much, much more than in the past. Our team can process about 10,000 KYCs in a day, which is a lot.

That's a lot. Wow. That's amazing. And I imagine as an exchanger verifier, you have to be able to do everything fast, process it, look into it and everything else. Yeah, yeah. It's because the, as fast as you can do it and as cost effectively you can do it, you can give the better prices to your clients. And at the moment we have, we have company that we will give one month free trial for all new customers.

So just welcome to test if you have the ICO or whatever, gambling site, just welcome to use our platform for free for one month. So do you charge a monthly fee or do you charge per transaction fee, I would imagine, I guess? Usually per transaction. Per transaction, yeah. Yeah, just some companies who have year after year or month after month, they have almost exactly the same amount.

So then we can decide it. But we guarantee at the moment that we are the cheapest one in this industry. Well, that's pretty good. That's a good deal. And I can see on your website, they can try one month free so people can sign up there and get it going on.

Anything else more we need to know, Jori? I think think it's all i think it's all at this moment sounds good well we certainly appreciate you guys uh coming on to the show and uh sharing this data with us so that people can check it out cryptocurrency is just freaking huge these days uh be sure to check out jory's site at verifier.io. And be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, hit that bell notification button. Be sure to tell your friends, neighbors, and relatives to sign up for the chrisfossshow.com. They can go to iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify as well.

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