In the words of the founder James Owusu,

‘We are building trust one check at a time. The whole system where tenants and buyers have to prove who they are and their financial background multiple times is not broken, it is just slow and inefficient, and has gaps, tenants and buyers want to move forward quickly; so they gravitate towards solutions and apps that give them the power to do this at speed, which is what we built.’

WINNING HUGE FUNDING

Checkboard has enjoyed a meteoric rise, and stellar backing, in March it announced £620k+ of investment, Edwin Appiah of Cornerstone Partners who was involved saw the merit of Checkboard, he said,

‘Inefficiencies in the application process provide a real opportunity to innovate and digitise customer onboarding practices. James … is well placed to embed these changing behaviours for property transactions’.

At the heart of Checkboard’s proposition is user experience, speed and a deeper dive into tenants/buyers ability to transact via open banking APIs, which forensically de-risks landlords and vendors, as it reveals a fuller picture.

As Yazad Bajina - Sales and Partnership Director says ‘We love speed and ease of use, that is why it takes tenants and buyers only five minutes to use our solution, and we can then automatically give precise, secure information to any stakeholder who needs to verify them. So, no hassle for the user and seamless efficiency, instead of a three day or more delay that is the norm’.

FASTEST & MOST COMPREHENSIVE SERVICE

Checkboard uses smart technology, to cover anti-money laundering, and prove identification using photo ID. But, its huge strength is that by providing six key services. It not only plugs the gaps that Referencing providers and AML providers have, it do so at huge speed.

Again James Owusu, explains, ‘We realised that landlords and vendors were between a rock and a hard place, as they needed insight as to who to ‘trust’ as being their next tenant or buyer. Conventionally the industry uses Referencing providers, but they only do affordability and credit checks, unlike Checkboard who do identity, credit, AML, Open banking, and many other checks. These checks include Global Registries, Land Registry and Bankruptcy Registers, in fact eleven data points in total’.

EASE OF INTEGRATION WITH CRM’s

Checkboard also knows that however brilliant and time saving a new service is, agents are extremely busy, sometimes too busy to use a service that can get tenants moved in more quickly, or sales safely agreed.

That is why Checkboard is looking to align itself with all of the agency CRM’s so that adoption will be as quick and painless as the user experience. With 15 integrations due to be completed by the end of August, Estate Agents will be able to easily pull data directly from their CRM systems.
As Yazad states ‘We cannot guarantee to onboard a new agent client in five minutes, but we do know that once our solution is working 24/7 for agents, their workflows and decision making is enhanced. The chances of their clients making the wrong decision about a buyer or tenant is minimised which is a hot topic with the amount of fraudulent behaviour in the lettings and sales sectors’.