This Week in Fintech's Podcast 🎧 The Philosophy of Identity, a conversation with Footprint Co-Founder Eli Wachs
Aug 12, 2025
Eli Wachs, Co-Founder and CEO of Footprint, discusses revolutionizing internet identity infrastructure. He shares insights from his exploration of identity at the Stanford library and collaboration with economist Raj Chetty. The conversation dives into Footprint's innovative onboarding solutions that simplify fraud prevention with just five lines of code. Eli also highlights challenges in digital payments and the role of user consent in data privacy. The potential of a centralized database of good actors takes center stage as a vital tool for enhancing security in the digital age.
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End-to-End Portable Identity
- Footprint builds an end-to-end embedded onboarding layer that verifies, stores, and reauthenticates users.
- Their goal is a portable identity network that centralizes 'good actors' rather than chasing every possible fraud vector.
Device-First Duplicate Detection
- Footprint emphasizes device fingerprinting and vaulting to link identities to devices and build duplicate detection.
- They use their front-end SDK to ask if we've seen this information on this device before, creating a new duplicate database.
Reduce False Negatives, Not Just False Positives
- Footprint focuses on reducing false negatives and proving valid users repeatedly, not just maximizing false-positive fraud catches.
- They aim to make verified identity portable across differing SIPs and vendor requirements to avoid useless portability artifacts.