<strong>Trust Alice</strong> provides a verified communication solution for customers, giving them confidence and trust - without disclosing confidential information.
Background
In a world of increased fraud, trust has been eroded to the point where individuals don’t trust communication via SMS, Chat Apps, Email, or Phone Calls to varying degrees. This results in legitimate businesses being unable to form trusted digital relationships with their customers or at least with a significantly higher Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). In addition, the individual has become a real target for Phishing attacks, with the aim of gaining access to secure and sensitive financial accounts or stealing their identity to make illicit transactions.
The idea of Trust Alice was born, with Alice being one of the fictional characters commonly used to describe cryptographic systems and protocols.
The Brief
Trust Alice saw the opportunity to help solve both of these problems by coming up with a solution that helps both the Company and its Customers. Companies needed a trusted way to communicate with their Customers or at least a way that would help their Customers to trust the existing communication methods. Companies often employ a common practice of Know Your Customer (KYC) but this fails to solve the problem of whether a Customer knows or trusts a Companies communications. The Solution Trust Alice quickly determined that if Trust Alice needed Companies to be able to send trusted communications to their Customers, Trust Alice needed to validate all company registrations to ensure they trusted a Company. Fathom built out a suite of APIs and grouped them into two distinct categories.
Alice Notify - allows a registered Company to send a trusted notification to a mobile phone informing them of an impending SMS, Chat, Email, or Phone call.
Alice Protect - provides the ability to scan a message text for phishing and malware links and gives a Trust Score and recommended actions.
Mobile applications were built by Fathom for both Android and Apple IOS to allow customers to register their mobile number with Trust Alice, receive and view Trusted notifications, scan suspicious messages all in one place.
The Technology
A serverless implementation hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen to provide low latency, high performance, proven security, fault tolerance, and limitless scalability. Using Fathoms API first strategy, API Gateway and AWS Lambda were used to provide the backend services with DynamoDB for the main data stores. AWS Cognito is used to secure all the APIs so that verified and trusted Companies have access to them.
Leveraging AI and Machine Learning, messages are scanned and then scored based on their risk. Amazon Rekognition is used to help further identify which company the fraudsters are impersonating.
Front-end web applications were built using React, with the native mobile apps, built using React Native for both the Android and IOS versions.