Ekata Revenue, Expansion, & Global Growth in 2020 - Ekata
Ekata is part of the Mastercard family. Ekata's solutions provide the most predictive and frictionless identity verification.

Ekata is part of the Mastercard family. Ekata's solutions provide the most predictive and frictionless identity verification.

2020: A Year of Non-Stop Global Growth and Expansion for Ekata

This month at Ekata we recapped a remarkably successful 2020 despite the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Our company significantly grew our global customer base and revenues, gained momentum in the financial services and payments sector, expanded our product portfolio, and drove significant growth in Europe and Asia-Pacific through our global offices and data infrastructure.

One of the reasons behind Ekata’s substantial rise these past 12 months is the global shift away from physical stores to digital shopping due to global lockdown. In fact, according to new data from IBM’s U.S Retail Index, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of eCommerce by consumers by five years in the US alone. Meanwhile, as reported by World Finance: The Voice of the Market, retailers across the world began putting more emphasis on cashless payments the moment the World Health Organization (WHO) warned against cash amidst fears it may spread the virus. (They later pushed back on this claim, but the die was cast: digital payments was in.)  In fact, in the first quarter of 2020, contactless payments grew by 40% globally – while ATM withdrawals in the UK fell by 60% over lockdown!

Naturally, this increase in demand among global eCommerce providers for customer onboarding and fraud prevention solutions was of huge benefit to us at Ekata, an international team of experts in this space.  Moreover, the rapidly changing regulatory environment in the financial services and payments industry has led to increased demand for identity verification solutions, particularly in pre-credit-card authorization use cases in Europe.

As our CEO Rob Eleveld explains further,

“2020 was a banner year for our business, one in which we outperformed all but 11 of the S&P 500 companies in revenue growth and profit. This is perhaps best captured by our 117% net customer revenue retention rate and 33% growth in revenues. With the first 12 weeks of the pandemic creating more growth in online business than the previous five years combined, the global demand for enterprise-grade digital identity verification solutions has never been higher.”

If you can excuse us blowing our own trumpet for a moment, we’d like to highlight the below key metrics Ekata tracked these past 12 months:

  • Added over 300 new customers to its growing, global customer base, which now includes:
    • Postmates and four other leading, high growth consumer marketplaces
    • 5 of the largest e-retailers globally and 8 of the top 10 in the US
    • The 5 largest travel/hospitality companies worldwide
  • Increased momentum in the financial services sector in 2020. Customers now include:
    • Checkout.com, which contributed to a 42% growth in Ekata’s global payments business
    • Five of the leaders in crypto-currency
    • The Top Five buy now, pay later providers, including Klarna
  • Our Identity Network saw 16B+ identity elements received through 6.2B+ globally distributed monthly queries and growing.
  • Transaction volumes in 2020 grew 170% in EMEA and 151% in APAC compared to 2019, as reflected in calls to the Ekata Identity Engine.
  • Significant growth within our product portfolio, infrastructure, and people, including:
    • The introduction of three new products for its global markets: Transaction Risk API 2.0, Account Opening API, and Address Risk API 4.0
    • The opening of its Asia-Pacific office and the launching of its third data center in Singapore, supporting rapid growth in the region and API delivery to any customer, anywhere in the world, in under 50 milliseconds.
    • A 55% increase in global staff to support the explosive growth of Ekata’s global go-to-market and customer needs.

Digital identity verification is key to offering more inclusive and frictionless experiences while also ensuring customer privacy, control, and security. At Ekata, we see continued opportunities for long-term customer growth and product innovation in identity verification for payments, financial services, and eCommerce. Read more about our progress from 2020 as reported by Mobile Payments Today. As we enter 2021, we are well equipped – and look forward – to meeting the ever-increasing demands within this global marketplace of financial institutions, payment companies, and providers.

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