Aidan McCarty Podcast Transcript
Aidan McCarty joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Aidan McCarty. Aidan McCarty is a co-founder and co-CEO of Verified, the identity infrastructure company killing the signup form. Verified turns a phone number into a completed application. A user enters their number, verifies it, and their real information fills itself in in about nine seconds instead of the five minutes and 16 clicks a typical fintech signup takes today.
A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and a Stanford dropout, Aidan walked away from the pre-med track after realizing software could scale to billions of people in a way practicing medicine rarely can. He has been building with his brother, Liam, since 2016. Well, good afternoon, Aidan. Welcome to the show.
Aidan McCarty: Thanks, Brian.
Thanks for having me. 10-minute podcast, nine-second signup, I think we’re gonna get along just fine.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate your time. Really do. If you don’t mind, I know you’re hailing out of Boston. I’m in Kansas City, so I always want to acknowledge that, that people do take the time out of their day to navigate time zones.
So, thank you. And Aidan, let’s jump in. You describe Verified as a Stripe for identity. Unpack that analogy for us. What does Stripe playbook actually teach you about building identity infrastructure, and what does it mean to be the layer every company plugs into rather than a standalone product people have to think about?
Aidan McCarty: Stripe didn’t make payments better. Stripe made payments disappear. Across thousands of companies that you go to, they use Stripe for their payments, and your payment info is automatically auto-filled for you. You click, it’s done. You don’t even think about it. That’s what Verified is doing for signup.
Stripe describes themselves as payments infrastructure for the web. We describe ourselves as identity infrastructure for the web. The best infrastructure is the kind that you never see, you never have to think about. It just works. More than anything, what Stripe taught us is that great infrastructure is all about speed and reliability.
We’ve made Verified insanely fast for everyone involved. The product managers can buy it in days, the developers can integrate in hours, and the users, most importantly, can sign up in seconds. So the Stripe analogy goes quite deep here, and it’s all about building super reliable, super fast infrastructure that just works.
And it’s quite deep. As I note, it’s not only because we’re two Irish brothers as well
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. And there, people do get some things right, but, you know, it’s that, that security piece, right? And we’ll talk a little bit more about that. I’m just glad there’s someone out there that is focused on the, the, the part that’s most important.
Efficiency and convenience are great, but that doesn’t get it when we don’t know who you’re who’s applied online, et cetera. So, I appreciate that product that you’re s- offering today. So let’s jump into your next question, Aiden. Here’s the part that sounds almost too good to be true.
A user enters a phone number, verifies it, and their real information, name, address, date of birth, even their health insurance appears ready in the form, ready for them to confirm. You have- Yep … measured signups at 9.3 seconds and at a 31% lift in conversion. One customer, their prediction market, Calci, saw over 60%.
Walk us through what that actually feels like on the user’s end, and then the harder question, when you’re moving people’s most sensitive information that fast, how is that more secure than the way we do it today rather than less?
Aidan McCarty: Yeah. A, a typical fintech signup flow is about 161 seconds. We actually just finished an onboarding report where we measured it across 280 companies.
It’s, it’s coming out soon. It’s 161 seconds to sign up. Dozen fields plus takes a long time. About 40% of users quit halfway Users arriving at these platforms expect a lot of friction. They expect it to take time. They expect it to be annoying. Instead, with Verified, what they get is magic. Takes nine point three seconds instead of a hundred and sixty-one.
Here’s what that actually feels like in practice. You arrive at a platform. You’re expecting it to be annoying. You’re trying to open a bank account. You’re trying to access care via a telehealth platform. Instead of entering anything at the start, you just tap, and we can now actually discover your phone number for you directly from your SIM card.
We can autofill it. We can verify it with the same security as an SMS OTP with you doing absolutely nothing. From there, we need one additional piece of data. You put in your first name. For example, you put in Brian, and we can source, with your consent, all of the additional information that you need to open an account, access care, get a loan, et cetera.
That’s things like your name, your birthday, your address your sex, and, and so on. That’s a magical experience, and it does more than just autofill that form. It impacts the experience all the way through. What we talk about is identity and sign-up is really about first impressions, and first impressions die hard.
You have about thirty seconds to make a great impression on somebody, and that lasts a lifetime. If you make a bad first impression, it has the exactly opposite effect. So that’s the magical experience that Verified provides. On the security question, that is a very important question, and it’s something that a lot of people don’t understand.
People think that there’s a trade-off between user experience and security, that inherently, if you make the user experience better, you must make the security worse. You’re losing some fidelity by shortening the time and compressing it down. It’s actually very much the opposite. By autofilling the data from trusted sources, you make it dramatically more secure.
The reason that’s true is if you allow somebody to just put in information on a form, you open yourself up to tons of bad actors who are going to try to impersonate other people. You can buy these days a Social Security n-number on the dark web for just a couple bucks. So you can construct these identities very easily and try to take bad action on the Internet by just filling out forms.
When you autofill that data instead from trusted sources tied back to a phone number all through authoritative information, it’s dramatically more secure, not less. This is something the regulators are slowly coming around to. FinCEN, OCC, FDIC, all these sort of financial regulators put out a joint statement last year authorizing autofill as a, a means of, of collecting the user’s information during sign-up for exactly this reason.
So we think in the future, one click can be more secure than a long set of forms you have to complete.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s, that’s awesome. And that kind of reminds me, being in the technology space and security is it’s, it’s like that you’ve got many platforms, different passwords, so people start writing it down on a little sticky note, and they hide it under their keyboard, right?
It’s the same concept there. And I think that’s awesome. And we’ve recently sh- shifted to that passwords never expire or they expire after a year because they’re longer. You can use spaces. It’s a key phrase versus, trying to change something every thirty to ninety days. So I, I really love that, but I just love the efficiency.
You know, you’re keeping that security, you’re doing a lot of that validation on the back end, but to cut something down from a hundred and sixty seconds to nine point three is amazing. I just love what you’re doing, so thank you. Aiden, you make a claim that reframes this whole category, that AI agent traffic will so dwarf human traffic on the internet that it rounds up to a hundred percent.
And the moment that happens, proving you are a real person stops being a compliance checkbox and becomes a scarce resource the entire internet runs on. Make that case for us, why is a phone number the identity primitive that survives that shift, and what does the internet look like if we get it wrong?
Aidan McCarty: Yeah. Almost every security system on the internet answers some variant of the same question. Can you present the right data? If you can present the right data, whether that’s some sort of biometric data, an image of a document, an email and a password, you’re you on the internet. Very few systems can answer, “Is this a person?”
And the systems that can answer that with any level of fidelity tend to be extremely high friction. And as you note, AI agents will soon not just outnumber humans on the internet. The amount of AI agent traffic will round up to a hundred percent. This seems like an audacious claim, but from first principles, it’s almost inevitable.
Already, they’re starting to outnumber humans on the internet. In five years, it will round up to a hundred percent. And so then the million-dollar question becomes, is this actually a human? And if it is a human, which human is it? It turns out that almost all other data points are quite easy for an AI agent to generate.
Email is free and infinite. Forms of personal data can easily be filled out by an AI. A phone number instead has rich data associated with it. You have to pay for quite a bit every month, and it is very, very hard for an AI agent to fake having a phone number. So it turns out to be this incredibly robust tie back to a physical human in the real world with a lot of rich data associated with it.
Not only personal data, but rich metadata. We have dozens of different attributes that we can look at already today. Things like carrier, phone type, how long has the phone plan been active? What does the activity level look like of this phone number over time? You can easily identify things like bot traffic.
And the beauty of this is that your phone number then becomes the primitive. It becomes the missing identity primitive on the internet, where if you show up and you have a phone number that you’ve had tenured for five, ten years, you’ve been using it like a human because you are a human. We can know that.
We can tell that instantly with very little friction, know that you’re a human and know which human you are. So the phone number, in our view, becomes the missing identity primitive in the twenty-first century
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. A couple things to highlight. You talked about one, is this a bot? Is this a human?
That’s one. And then if, is it a human, which human out of the eight billion in the world is this now? And you highlighted some great things, some attributes around some data points around just again, having a phone number, right? And then you have access to that cellular data that helps you validate a lot of that.
So I, I really appreciate that. Aidan, you believe that today’s way of proving you’re you, reams of forms, CAPTCHAs, photos of your face and your driver’s license, et cetera, will soon look like as dated as the fax machine. Paint that picture for us. Five years out, what does opening a brokerage account or getting a prescription actually feel like?
And what has to happen technically or on the regulatory side for Verified to be the infrastructure that makes it so?
Aidan McCarty: The fax machine didn’t die because somebody built a better fax machine. It died because sending a piece of physical paper across town became absurd. I’m young enough that I’ve not sent a lot of faxes in my life, but I have sent a, a number.
And these days, every time that somebody asks me to s- to send a fax, I, I think how absurd,
Brian Thomas: right?
Aidan McCarty: There’s so many better ways to send this piece of information to you than a fax that are dramatically more efficient and probably more secure quite frankly. The same thing is going to be happening with signup forms.
Forms are going to die in a very similar way. When it becomes possible to just tap, autofill all of your information, which it’s already possible today, those forms are going to disappear incredibly fast. It’s going to look unbelievably antiquated when you go to go sign up for a bank account or try to access healthcare and somebody presents you with a giant long form.
You’ll think, “Oh my God, are these people living back in, tw- the 2020s,” or, or something. And so this is an almost inevitable transformation of where it’s going simply because any time that you have this sort of state change where it’s 10X faster and more secure, everything is going to transfer to that method of interacting rather than the other.
And the reason I choose a fax machine as I think a good analogy here is it’s infrastructure. In the same way that we’re building identity infrastructure, the fax was infrastructure for sending information. If you have better infrastructure for sending information, you’re gonna do that. So this gets to the point of speed and reliability that we’re really focused on at Verified
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome.
Love the analogy, of course. Fax machine was a thing at, at its time but of course, that time has moved on, and we’ve gotten better ways to send information. And I really like that. But what you’re building not only is speed and reliability, but that security piece, that, verifiability which I think is really important.
And you did highlight those items. I just love it, really do. Everything’s about convenience for people, but you’re keeping that security piece in there as well. So I, I appreciate that.
Aidan McCarty: Absolutely.
Brian Thomas: And Aidan, last question, you and Liam are both co-CEO and you’re brothers. Most investors would tell you that this is a structural mistake. How does it actually work in practice?
Aidan McCarty: We certainly heard that, but the best investors see it as a good thing not a problem. As brothers, we’re a year apart. We’ve… We’re almost Irish twins. We’ve been working on things since we were two and three years old together. We worked on projects in high school and college and immediately after college leading up to founding this company.
The way that works best for us is we don’t split the day-to-day operations directly, we split domains. So Liam heads up everything tech and product. I head up everything on the business side. Things like fundraising decisions we make together. This works incredibly effectively for us. Most co-founders, I angel invest and advise companies often, many co-founders have spats where they take three years to really figure out what it looks like to work together.
We’ve been working together since day one. So it works incredibly well for us. We split domains, and it, it operates with extreme efficiency across the organization.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. You c- you can’t have a better partnership there, that’s for sure. Aidan, and I just wanna let you know, I, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and where can people find you and Verified?
Aidan McCarty: They can find us at verified.inc, so verified.inc. If you’re somebody running signup in fintech, healthcare, gaming, any other regulated industry in the US, come talk to us. We’ll help you identify the constraints in your onboarding flow and whether you use us or some sort of other autofill vendor we’d love to, to help you power a faster signup for your users.
Brian Thomas: Thank you again, and bye for now.
Aidan McCarty Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
