Cognito Broadcast

Say Hello to Cognito

We founded BlockScore in 2014 with the goal of making verifying your users as easy as Stripe made billing your users. Over the past 3 years, we’ve learned a tremendous amount about the identity data industry while helping our customers onboard millions of users and wanted to make a change to reflect that.

Starting today, we are renaming from BlockScore to Cognito. Along with this name change, we are also announcing our completely re-imagined identity verification product. The most common feedback we get with our traditional product is that it requires too much intrusive information to verify a user and that knowledge-based authentication is too high friction while not providing enough security benefit. Our new product directly addresses these two concerns:

Cognito is dramatically lower friction

All Cognito needs to verify a user is a phone number. Using this input, we return your user’s real-world identity including their name, date of birth, address, and SSN. If a user can’t be verified using just a phone number, you can send us another request using their name, date of birth, address, SSN or any combination of the above as inputs and we will attempt to verify them again.

Our gradual approach allows you to give the majority of your users the best signup experience possible while maximizing verification match rates. This means that our built-in fallback is still a better user experience than our competitors’ best case scenario. Cognito adapts to your signup flow rather than defining it.

Cognito improves user authentication

Because we are able to link a phone number with a real-world identity, all you have to do is confirm that a user is in possession of her phone using a one-time passcode and you have a much stronger level of identity assurance that she is who she claims to be. Not only is this a lower friction experience than KBA, but it is also a significantly more secure solution. Cognito ends buying black market data to bypass questions about address history or car loans.

What happens to our current products?

To our current customers, all of our traditional products will remain fully supported and maintained. Some of our customers, big and small, will not want to switch to Cognito and we won’t force you to. We will, however, offer current customers special deals if you would like to switch over.


The team has worked incredibly hard to bring this product to you and we look forward to hearing what you think.

Alain Meier - CEO, Cognito

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