Product Demo: Professional License Verify

For those who have joined, my name is Vijay Devarajan. I am the Head of Product at Mesh. Before Mesh, I was the Head of Product for eBay's risk product, ensuring we keep bad actors off the eBay marketplace and making sure that buyers and sellers can trust their counterparties in any transactions they make. Before that, I was Head of Product for a number of consumer apps at Capital One, as well as some lending tools. So, I'm very familiar with the problem.

Overview of Mesh

Mesh is a company that helps our customers verify and onboard legitimate businesses and professionals using the most up-to-date data to cut out inaccuracies and friction so that our customers have strict compliance, reduced risk, but also a smooth onboarding process for their businesses that they're trying to onboard. Verifying professional licenses is difficult for three reasons. The first is it's very complex. In the United States alone, you have the 50 states plus DC and Puerto Rico. Each of those jurisdictions or territories has its own data sources, its own rules and requirements, and its own taxonomies.

This makes it very complicated to have a single process or tool to verify licenses in each of those places. The second is around data freshness. At any given time, just as an example, I believe California has something like 280,000 professional licenses that exist. And at any given time, more than 16% of those are inactive. Those can be inactive because the professional just lapsed on renewing their license and paying their dues, or it could be because it was suspended or revoked for some kind of bad action.

Ensuring that you have the latest status of your professionals is very important to staying compliant and maintaining trust in your platform. And the third big problem is that it's not a one-time problem to solve. It's not reserved for the onboarding part of the experience. It has to be monitored. Your professional license has to be monitored on an ongoing basis in order to remain compliant.

It can require significant resources for each company or each marketplace or each service provider to stay on top of their compliance as it relates to professional licenses. In a nutshell, we at Mesh aim to streamline this process both for you as the customer as well as for the professionals and businesses who are trying to get verified. We make it easy to collect information from professionals. We have a couple of flexible options in terms of how to collect that information, and you'll see this in the demo. We have a no-code UI that can be customized to your colors, logos, etc., to really incorporate it into your preexisting onboarding flow with very little engineering resources needed to integrate, or you can work with our API.

In other words, if you're already collecting the data from your professionals, then you can just send that data over to us via API. We can be flexible in terms of how to collect that information. Next, we have real-time verification. This solves the data freshness problem. Every time a professional goes to get verified, we make that search to the authoritative databases, say, the licensing board of whatever state.

We do that search in real-time, so we have the latest information that the state licensing board makes available to us. Also, the way professionals provide data to us versus what might actually be in the license database can be slightly different. People have middle names that they may or may not use, folks get married and their last names may change, and different things can be different that people make typos. If the system has trouble matching the license to the professional, then we also have a team of agents to manually ensure that we are matching the right license. The idea is to take any effort around license verification away and provide that for our customers.

Customizable Decisions

We can customize what we accept as a match based on the risk tolerance and the particular use case that you might have. A marketplace like eBay or Etsy or some other e-commerce marketplace may have a different threshold than, say, a lender or someone that's in a regulated industry. We can customize the rules based on the thresholds that our customers want. Finally, we provide monitoring.

We solve the problem of ongoing monitoring by re-verifying professional licenses on the cadence that customers want, whether it's monthly, quarterly, and we can do it more often or less often as the use case suggests. So, that's the end-to-end flow. The idea is to make it easy for the professional, make it easy for their customers, and really handle everything on our end.

Demo

So I will switch over to our demo here. Mesh provides a number of different kinds of verifications. The one we're going to see is the professional license verification. But we also do business entity validation against authoritative data sources like the IRS or the Secretaries of State. We do TIN number checks. We do certificates of insurance.

We can collect all the information and generate W-9 forms. And so we help in all forms of these onboarding use cases. You can think of each of these verifications as a Lego brick, and you can build a custom verification or onboarding workflow using these Lego bricks that work for your particular use case. For this demo, we use a fictional company called Circle. It's the company we made up to do these demos.

This is meant to show that the Mesh user interface can be customized to fit your needs. We use your logo, your color scheme, your typography. It should be indistinguishable from the onboarding flow that you already have. It is a no-code integration. You simply provide us with what you want it to look like, and we provide a URL that you can incorporate into your existing flow, or you can email to the businesses and professionals you want verified, and they can just jump into this flow.

Authentication

So with that, we're going to jump in. I'll mention that this is a real verification that we're going to do. This is happening live. The first step is authentication. We take our data security and privacy very seriously.

The first step is to make sure that this professional is in control of their email address. We'll provide an email that will send my email a one-time password. We'll jump over to my email and refresh. There we go. We just got our one-time password here.

Paste it over. Next, we're going to collect information about your professional license. I have a real license here that we'll verify. This one is a Florida contractor, a roofing contractor. Here we go.

We'll select the license type as general contractor. There is an option to select more licenses. In a single shot, a pro can have their multiple licenses verified, and many professionals do, in fact, have multiple licenses. We'll hit next, and off it goes. I mentioned that we do these searches in real-time, and we err on the side of accuracy over speed.

This does take around 60 seconds on average to complete. While we're waiting, I'll show you the other side of our app, which is called the Mesh Hub. This is the portal that our customers get so they can manage their orders. They can manage their users and permissions. They can generate API keys and so on.

This is a good way to see what responses you would get from our API webhook when you request information about one of these professionals. This response is for a more complicated verification. This one involves a certificate of insurance. It involves a W-9 form. It involves a business risk check, which looks for litigations and bankruptcies and liens.

This is business verification, making sure that this particular business is legitimate and registered with the secretary of state, as well as a professional license. You can see the way our system provides, not just that its business has been verified, but also a lot of detail about each of those things. You'll see specific information about what kind of business it is, how they are incorporated, whether they have bankruptcies and litigations, and then specifics around insurance, such as what the policy amount is and what type of policy it is. There's a lot of rich data here that you can use as part of your particular use case.

If it's underwriting as an example, there are a lot of inputs into your underwriting that you can use. Meanwhile, let's go back to the email and see if we've gotten a response. There we go. In the time I was talking, the system has gone out and found the license that we were trying to verify and has reached back out to me as the pro and said we've been verified successfully. Now let's go back into the Hub and take a look at what that looks like.

This, Rogers, Cagney Drew, was the license that we tried to verify, and we got a response back saying it's been approved. The license is verified. We have a bunch of information about that license on the Florida State Licensing Board that we bring back. We can see what kind of license it is, the status of the license, when it expires, when it was issued, and what business it is under. All of this information is available to you as part of the verification.

Coverage

As I mentioned, coverage-wise, we cover home services, including construction and architects. We cover professional beauty licenses, and we've recently added support for medical professionals and dentists as well. I didn't mention this at the end of the data collection flow, but we collect information about the experience. We look at both the feedback from users as well as how long it took to complete, and we're always looking to optimize that input flow. When we first launched, we started out with something like a 75% completion rate from beginning to end for even some of our more complicated verification flows, and now we have that number up higher than 95%.

Again, it's not just about mitigating risk or compliance. It's also about streamlining onboarding and maximizing conversion for our customers. One additional thing I should mention, I did get an email that notifies me that the verification was successful. There are not a huge percentage, but there are numerous cases where the pro might make a mistake. They might fat finger their license number or something that makes it difficult for us to match.

We have a help desk team that will reach out to the pros to correct that information if possible. That's, again, something that our customers don't have to worry about. That notification might look slightly different. It would say, "Hey, we need more information to complete this verification."

Similarly, in an ongoing way when we're monitoring, if the status changes, we send that notification to you, the customer, via webhook notification. We can also send the notification to the professional and say, "Hey, your license has expired." Oftentimes, our notification is what reminds them to go back and have their license renewed and come back and let us know. We reverify them. If they're in good standing again, we let the customer know that this professional is back in good standing. There are a number of different scenarios, and we handle all of those.

On average, it takes less than 60 seconds. I mentioned in the challenges area that you have 52 different states and territories, each with their own data sources. The number varies a little bit based on the state, but on average, we've done a lot of time and motion studies, and it takes under 60 seconds. That's something that we're always looking to improve. The trade-off is we do those searches in real-time, so you can be very confident that this is the freshest possible data.

Matching Algorithm

Our matching algorithm is a probabilistic model that uses multipoint matching. We look for multiple signals. For example, if the license number matches exactly and the last name is a good match, but the first name is different, then we can set up rules, and the customer can say, "Oh, we'll accept that." Or we can send that to a human review team, which is what we do when the match is not 100% confident, and we have human eyes review that and see if it appears to be the same person. Would a reasonable person think that this is the same person? If not, we'll reach back out to the pro and have them correct it.

We want to maximize conversion, but we also want to make sure that we are matching the right license to the right professional. The steps are we have a model that we think is pretty sophisticated in matching. If that is not 100% confident, we have human review to see if they can correct some of the matching issues that might exist, and finally, we reach back out to the pro. For the types of licenses that we verify, we operate in all 50 states plus DC and Puerto Rico. Right now, we cover home services licenses, including construction and architecture.

Types of Licenses

Under construction, there's all the subtypes. There are roofers, plumbers, electricians, etc., general contractors. We also cover professional beauty, including salons, barbers, massage therapists, etc. Then we cover medical professionals and dentistry. We're always able to expand.

If there are use cases of professional licenses that you're interested in, we can probably accommodate that. Feel free to reach out, and we're happy to clarify. If you have any other questions, please visit us at meshverify.com. We have the product sheet with some additional background information specific to this product at meshverify.com/plv. Please feel free to reach out to us at meshverify.com/contact.

You can reach out to me directly at vijay@meshverify.com. We'll be happy to tell you more about the product, tell you more about the other products we have, do a demo, and talk about your use case specifically and what we can do to help improve your compliance onboarding and general trust on your platform.