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The Verifico Team
When Paris Benson’s friend was scammed out of $10,000 by a so-called financial advisor he found on Craigslist, Benson put his self-taught coding skills to work. He tracked down the scammer and police eventually were called in. It’s not just his friend either, Benson says that 20,000 people turn to Craigslist everyday for financial services! You know, that place where you found that free, stained futon.
Tracking down the guy who scammed his friend was a pivotal experience for Benson, who then started a scam-busting website. “It was a personal project for me,” said Benson.
That personal project shut down around 70 financial scammers over a one year period, leading Benson to realize the market for financial services was severely flawed. Chasing financial frauds is a little like playing whack-a-mole and there’s not a lot of help for small potatoes. Benson knew there had to be a better option, but it didn’t seem to exist. He says, “the bigger problem is there’s no secure place for people to find financial consultants.”
Benson founded Verifico, the anti-Craigslist of financial advisors (not his tagline). If Craigslist is a free-for-all, Verifico is a structured, online marketplace that values trust above all else. The site verifies anyone offering a service (the verification process uses algorithms). The need for a trustworthy site was validated by user experience: “The first thing [customers] think about is trust and reputation. Nine out of ten customers will go with the person they trust, versus the cheaper option,” said Benson.
The potential for such a marketplace is huge; on the supply side, “literally there’s a million of these guys across the country,” said Benson.
Pair that with the 20,000 people checking out Craigslist for financial advice and that’s a pretty hefty market.
When Benson started out, he knew he’d be a small percentage of his business client’s revenues. What he didn’t anticipate was that financial advisors would want to use his platform for all their clients – even the ones they found elsewhere. “I didn’t expect that I would have to build an entire platform that literally handled the entire interaction between customer and provider from beginning to end,” Benson said.
That provided another business opportunity and a way to make users satisfied, so the company now provides back-end support for these businesses.
For Benson, one of the biggest hurdles to starting his company was understanding the space. “Shutting down scams helped me understand these businesses inside out,” he said. Another hurdle – the stigma of the space, which Verifico is trying to clean up.
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Verifico is expanding fast, with 20X growth over the last 10 months and plans to “gobble up market share,” said Benson. Over the next year, the team will roll out a mobile version of the product. Benson also plans to target Craigslist users, and one by one, bring them over to his site.
The downtown LA-based team has around a dozen employees, but is looking to expand. Verifico is looking specifically for engineers, sales and customer support positions. Scammers need not apply.
