Protecting 2,700 Customers Across 100 Million Transactions, with Socure's CTO Arun Kumar

Jan 28, 2025

Arun Kumar, CTO of Socure, a leader in identity management, shares insights from his impressive tech career with Amazon and Citadel. He discusses Socure's rapid growth, serving 2,700 clients, including top U.S. banks, while processing hundreds of millions of transactions each month. Arun highlights Socure's innovative use of a real-time identity graph to combat sophisticated fraud tactics like deepfakes. He also reveals plans for expanding their services into transaction monitoring and leveraging Generative AI for operational efficiency.

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ANECDOTE

Scaling Systems at Amazon and Citadel

Arun Kumar enjoys building large-scale systems, like one at Amazon handling 100 million transactions per second during Prime Day.
He also worked on scaling systems to stock exchange volumes at Citadel, combining high throughput, low latency, and machine learning.

ANECDOTE

Early Career at Bloomberg

Arun Kumar's career began at Bloomberg, working on low-latency, real-time financial systems.
This experience sparked his passion for building highly responsive systems that handle large transaction volumes.

INSIGHT

Overlaps Between Finance and Consumer Grids

Arun Kumar found overlaps between financial data and consumer grids at Amazon, like surfacing stocks versus products.
Extracting product attributes at scale, such as differentiating pens from Coke cans, presented interesting challenges.

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Lex interviews Arun Kumar, the CTO of Socure, an identity management and risk assessment company. In this exciting episode, Arun touches on: (1) his experience building large-scale, high-throughput, and low-latency systems at companies like Amazon and Citadel, and how he applies that expertise to the identity verification and fraud detection challenges at Socure. (2) Socure's rapid growth, serving over 2,700 customers including 9 of the top 10 U.S. banks and over 30 state agencies, processing hundreds of millions of transactions per month. (3) Socure's approach to building a real-time identity graph by aggregating signals from devices, phone numbers, IPs, and other data points to detect and prevent sophisticated fraud tactics like deepfakes and fraud GPTs. (4) The company's recent acquisition of Effectiv to simplify the integration process for customers and improve efficiency, as well as its use of Generative AI to automate various tasks. Lastly, (5) Socure's future plans to expand beyond account opening and login into transaction monitoring, as well as exploring opportunities in the growing embedded finance and digital identity spaces.

MENTIONED IN THE CONVERSATION

Topics: Socure, Effectiv, Citadel, Amazon, Identity management, digital identity, generative AI, deepfakes, fraud prevention, machine learning, identity verification

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TIMESTAMPS

1’02: Scaling Innovation: Exploring High-Performance Systems and Real-Time Technology

4’04: From Financial Data to Machine Learning: Scaling Systems and Solving Edge Cases

8’49: Bridging Big Tech and Quant Finance: Exploring Technology Overlaps and Ultra-Low Latency Systems

11’12: Protecting Digital Identity at Scale: The Journey to Socure and Solving Real-Time Fraud Challenges

15’50: Building the Network Effect: How Socure Became a Leader in Identity Verification and Fraud Prevention

21’00: Battling Modern Fraud: Deepfakes, Generative AI, and the Evolving Landscape of Digital Security

26’30: Revolutionizing Customer Success: Simplifying Integrations with No-Code Solutions and Real-Time Performance Insights

29’57: Scaling Customer Integration: Fixed Costs, POCs, and Generative AI-Driven Value Propositions

34’00: Driving Efficiency and Scale: Socure's Evolving Product Roadmap and Future Vision

36’14: Learning from Customization: Standardizing for Scalability and Long-Term Growth

38’58: Expanding Horizons: Growing Market Share and Addressable Markets in Digital Transactions

41’00: The channels used to connect with Arun & learn more about Socure

Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.

Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, Daniella

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