Online identity theft cost consumers $52 Billion last year and affected nearly 42 million people across the US alone. Globally, cybercrime is expected to reach $10.5 Trillion by 2025. Aside from the direct financial losses suffered by businesses and individuals there is a wider social issue here too. Ordinary consumers have a general lack of trust in online systems that deters them from moving and storing more of their assets online, particularly the more valuable ones. There needs to be a seismic shift in consumer attitudes for this to change. Would you put your property deeds online if there was a risk they could be stolen? KwikTrust is one team that has set out to solve this problem. They have built a patent-pending tech platform that enables consumers and businesses to upload and validate the authenticity of any asset and lock it to the validated identity of the owner. Whilst KwikTrust proudly tells users “Free, unlimited e-signatures for all” the solution runs much deeper than this. Using know-your-client (KYC) processes, that are widely used by financial services providers to identify an individual, KwikTrust takes this process one step further by recording the information on a blockchain thus creating a tamperproof record. Coupling this with their unique file validation process opens up a myriad of use cases including creating and transferring deeds of ownership, protecting intellectual property, distributing money to rightful beneficiaries and even simple contract signing! Describing the product the company’s CEO, Simon Read, said this week “it’s a bit like Docusign and Dropbox had a baby on the blockchain and we’ve added in KYC so you know who the parents are.” He continued “When the team set out to build the platform we started with the problem in mind. I was working on a due diligence exercise for a business acquisition.

There was so much information to collect and check and we had to be sure that the files had been signed and validated by the right people. We also encountered instances where there was more than one version of the same agreement. It became apparent that neither Dropbox nor Docusign could solve this problem.” With the increases in online fraud and the continued shift towards working from home, expedited by the pandemic, the market for e-KYC is forecast to grow at 21.5% CAGR and the market for e-signatures is forecast to grow fast at 36.1% CAGR reported Vantage Market Research and Fortune Business Insights respectively. With a foot in both camps, KwikTrust is the disruptor in these marketplaces with an arguably superior product and with the potential to make it big. The company is acquiring new users at a rate of more than 20% growth week-on-week and with a low per customer acquisition cost and a global market opportunity we predict that there is massive growth potential. KwikTrust raised $1.8 million of seed investment from hundreds of investors earlier this year, which they deployed to build the product and they have now established offices in both Silicon Valley and London. The company will shortly be embarking on their next investment round, expected to be around $5 million, to start to scale the business with a focus on new user acquisition and product enhancements. Cybercriminals had better look for other careers. KwikTrust is coming!