Modernizing Identity Verification Solutions on AWS with Prove

Founded as Payfone in 2008, Prove authenticates more than 20 billion transactions annually for more than 1,000 businesses worldwide, including 9 of the top 10 banks in the United States. Unlike traditional identity verification methods, which rely on passwords or multi-factor authentication, Prove has developed unique identity verification solutions based on privacy-preserving technology within a user’s smartphone. With more than 200 patents and patent applications across authentication, digital identity, fraud, passwordless login, and more, Prove’s technology links data from the SIM card of a customer’s mobile phone to other digital identification methods, such as facial recognition. A user’s authentication prompts other actions, such as pre-filling information in a credit card application or accessing a banking website with password-free authentication. Prove’s platform, Prove Identity Network (PIN), serves as a “trust layer” so that banks, fintechs, retailers, and other businesses can safely interact with their customers.

The company originally operated from a data center, but its on-premises infrastructure limited its ability to scale internationally. “We had to rework some of our software and think about where we were going to deploy it and how to run it reliably,” says Aaron Rodriguez, principal engineer at Prove. “For us, AWS was the natural fit.” In 2021, Prove acquired another company’s product, which had been running in a data center, and decided to lift and shift it to AWS. “We needed to grow, and the scalability in the data center was very slow,” says Adrian Fachal, vice president of platform engineering at Prove. “We made a strategic decision to go to the cloud for the future.”

Prove worked alongside the AWS team to modernize its technology stack as it migrated its PIN platform to the cloud. AWS provided support for day-to-day issues and collaborated with Prove on its strategic vision. “We’ve always had the support of AWS to help us grow as a company, acquire customers, and be better at running a software-as-a-service company,” says Rodriguez. “They push us to be the best, even entertaining what seem like harebrained ideas, helping us to shape the direction we want to go and supporting us with their expertise.”

Prove containerized its applications and deploys them on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises data centers. Instead of managing their Oracle database as they did on premises, Prove engineers use Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Using Amazon RDS, engineers have cut in half how much time they spend managing applications. Additionally, Prove significantly reduced its 99th percentile response time, responding to its slowest requests three times faster than it did previously. The company also has seen an increase in reliability, cutting downtime by more than half and expecting to achieve five nines in 2024 when it deploys in multiple AWS Regions.

Prove’s information security team implements a suite of AWS services for best practices in AWS Cloud Security, such as automatic patching. “We need to react fast without disrupting our road map by stopping to work on vulnerabilities,” says Fachal. “From a compliance and security perspective, AWS has the best security posture. Our customers trust AWS.”

By retiring on-premises infrastructure and migrating to the cloud, Prove avoided a $6 million capital expenditure designated for physical infrastructure. Additionally, the company has reduced database management cost by five times since migrating to Amazon RDS. “Innovation comes at a much lesser cost because we have a standard way of deploying, monitoring, and running our business,” says Fachal.

Prove’s customers have provided increasingly frictionless experiences for their users. For example, the Prove Pre-Fill solution quickly populates application forms with verified identity information, resulting in 79 percent faster customer onboarding and a 15 percent increase in sign-ups. “When our clients are onboarding new customers for a credit card, it’s mission critical that they have a great experience to drive conversion from the full process,” says Nicole Jass, chief product officer at Prove. “Our solutions need to respond fast.”

Prove now develops all of its new products in the cloud. In 2023, for example, the company launched Prove Auth, a cloud-based authentication solution for mobile apps and web-based and omnichannel customer experiences. “AWS has handled the breadth of products that we’ve built,” says Rodriguez. “On AWS, we have the ability to rapidly iterate and quickly deploy services at a pace we never would have had if we were stuck in a data center.”