After analyzing millions of social media insights from thousands of global brands, Emplifi forecasts greater alignment between marketing and CX strategies

Emplifi, a leading customer engagement platform, today announced its top social media predictions for 2024. These predictions point to substantially greater alignment between marketing and customer experience teams and are based on social media campaign insights from thousands of global brands that leverage the Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud. As brands build out their 2024 goals, marketers and CX teams will expand their social commerce efforts, explore new ways to leverage their social channels, messaging apps, and chatbot technology, diversify their mix of social video content, and increase investments in social intelligence tools.

“In 2023, social media marketing faced unprecedented challenges due to the rise of ChatGPT, industry layoffs across tech, and major platform changes like Twitter's transformation to X and Meta's introduction of Threads," said Zarnaz Arlia, CMO, Emplifi. "As brands navigated these disruptions, customer experience (CX) remains a crucial focus amid increasing consumer expectations. Faced with resource constraints, our marketing and CX teams are adopting more strategic, integrated approaches, leveraging shared tools to seamlessly blend marketing, commerce and support. We anticipate stronger collaboration between these teams as they adapt to the evolving social media landscape and the modern customer needs.”

Emplifi’s Top 6 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2024

1. Social shopping will become a crucial element of online commerce strategies as brands aim to streamline the transition from product discovery to purchase. The role of social media in enhancing a brand’s eCommerce strategy is more significant than ever. Modern consumers use social media not only for discovering and learning about products but also for making purchases. The key lies in creating a seamless experience and offering necessary content for informed buying decisions—such as ratings, reviews, and user-generated content (UGC)—coupled with an intuitive and effortless in-app shopping experience that minimizes friction. Given that nearly 90% of consumers report that ratings and reviews greatly influence their purchasing decisions, integrating authentic content from real product reviews within the same social media post as a purchase link can significantly boost a brand’s social commerce initiatives.

​2. Messaging apps and chatbots are set to experience increased adoption, offering marketing and customer support teams efficient 24/7 communication channels on a large scale. As email inboxes become increasingly cluttered, making emails less effective, more than 50% of customers now expect responses within an hour when they post a question on a brand’s digital channel. This has led marketers and customer support teams to explore new ways to engage with customers promptly. Modern consumers are more inclined to interact with brands that skillfully utilize messaging apps for various communications, ranging from discount offers and product updates to addressing customer support queries. AI-powered chatbots enable real-time, effective customer engagement. Similarly, business tools in WhatsApp, Messenger, and other SMS messaging platforms allow brands to interact with their customers efficiently and at scale.

3. Customer support teams are increasingly turning to social platforms to address customer inquiries and concerns. In today’s digital- and social-first landscape, consumers expect to engage with brands on social media for more than just marketing and commerce; they seek support and care as well. As the number of consumers reaching out via social platforms for questions and product inquiries rises, customer support teams are adapting by employing more social media marketing tools and dedicating more time to connecting with customers on their preferred channels. Forward-thinking customer care professionals are already utilizing social media to refine their support strategies, yielding significant results. For instance, one brand experienced a 40% reduction in call volumes and a nearly 30% decrease in wait times for speaking with a live agent.

4. Brands diversifying their video content to include both short and long formats are likely to achieve higher engagement. Social video platforms like Reels and TikTok continue to rise in popularity: this year, Instagram Reels surpassed all other content types on the app, generating 55% more interactions than single-image posts. Additionally, TikTok's user growth skyrocketed, with brands experiencing up to a fivefold increase in follower counts. While the focus was once on short, “snackable” videos that ran 1 to 13 seconds in length, brands are now gaining traction with longer videos, ranging from 26 to 90 seconds. The key is identifying the most effective content formats and channels for your audience. By experimenting with different video lengths, formats, and platforms, brands can gather valuable insights on the types of video content that resonate best with their target audience.

5. As brands increasingly prioritize privacy in their marketing strategies, social intelligence will become essential for obtaining deeper consumer insights. With consumer privacy being a critical concern, marketers are exploring new methods to understand consumer behavior. An earlier Forrester Consulting survey commissioned by Emplifi revealed that 78% of marketing leaders considered investing in technology for customer insights a critical or high priority, while another 45% identified brand health as a key metric for marketing success. Utilizing social listening tools that offer sentiment analysis, as well as capabilities to track impressions, mentions, and social interactions, provides brands with a comprehensive view of their customers and allows for effective real-time brand reputation management. In the upcoming months, an increasing number of brands are expected to adopt social intelligence tools, applying these insights throughout the customer journey to enhance their marketing and customer support strategies and strengthen their brand reputation efforts.

6. Generative AI applications and AI-powered tools will become integral to customer support efforts, driving productivity across the entire customer service organization. AI-powered platforms are delivering extraordinary efficiencies for customer care departments, empowering customer service agents to optimize their daily routines—streamlining interactions, automating routine tasks, and providing lightning-fast responses to common customer questions. With the ability to understand context, sentiment, customer histories, and more, AI technology enables brands to forge deeper connections with their customers. Brands are already experiencing unparalleled results with AI-powered chatbots delivering as high as 97% match rates when answering customer inquiries. As AI tools continue to evolve, we’ll see even broader adoption by customer care and CX leaders focused on driving greater efficiencies across their organization.

"As we adapt to the dynamic digital and social landscape, our strategies are evolving to meet the contemporary needs of customer engagement. From managing the shift away from traditional email communications to embracing the immediacy required on social platforms, we’re integrating AI-powered chatbots, leveraging a mix of video content across social channels, and expanding how we use messaging apps,” said Arlia. “With customer privacy remaining a top priority, we're focusing on social intelligence to gain deeper insights into their behaviors and preferences. This strategy enhances the customer journey while ensuring marketing tactics remain both innovative and privacy-conscious. It's a balancing act between leveraging cutting-edge technology and maintaining a human-centric approach."

Could GrowthLoop's visionary approach usher in a new paradigm for marketing?

GrowthLoop, a Composable CDP, announced the release of a range of generative AI-enabled product enhancements built on Google Cloud. Now that GrowthLoop has helped solve customer data bottlenecks for marketing teams at companies like Mercari and Red Sox with a leading composable customer data platform (CDP), it has set out to solve the next frontier of generation: the generation of audiences, journeys, and creative via embedded generative AI throughout the campaign design and launch process.

This news follows three 2023 announcements from GrowthLoop leading up to this groundbreaking development:

• The launch of a joint solution with BigQuery and Typeface, which opened the door for marketers to use generative AI to create more personalized marketing content at scale across campaigns.
• Generative audiences from natural language with GrowthLoop Marve and Google Cloud's Vertex AI, to close the gap between business users and data teams, on top of their composable customer data platform (CDP) built on Google BigQuery.
• The launch of Easy Button with Google Cloud to get started with a composable CDP quickly, powered by GrowthLoop and Google Cloud Cortex Framework.

The introduction of generative AI in an end-to-end solution for marketers signals GrowthLoop's advancement of an entirely new category: Generative Marketing.

Generative Marketing involves GrowthLoop using Google Cloud's advanced AI technology to create, activate, and measure performant audiences, journeys, and campaigns, all unlocked by a composable CDP foundation on BigQuery. Modern, effective marketing has always been focused on a loop: Build a campaign from insights, test, review results, iterate, and test again. Aided by generative AI, Generative Marketing opens up unique possibilities not provided to marketers before today.

Generative AI only works with enterprise marketing when it is supercharged with customer data and when governance and review capabilities–keeping the user in the loop at all times–are front and center. GrowthLoop is working with Google Cloud to deploy its generative marketing capabilities on BigQuery to connect directly with an organization's customer data with zero-copy architecture to make this data more directly useful to the marketing organization while maintaining security, governance, and a human in the loop.

By mobilizing generative AI across marketing workflows, teams can benefit in several impactful ways: increased productivity, more targeted personalization, content generation at scale, and a shifted focus toward growth-driven experimentation.

The solution brings several new capabilities to marketers' workflows in GrowthLoop:

1. Audience Studio - Build audiences with the help of generative AI
1. Marketers can engage in open brainstorming with GrowthLoop AI to insert the goals of their campaigns and generate audience targets to fulfill those goals.
2. Marketers are always in the loop. Review and modify any audience generated and sync them to a destination in seconds.
2. Generative Content - Generate relevant creative with persona prompts
1. Marketers can generate draft creative for email, display ads, specific to customer profiles and personas that make up the generated audiences.
3. Omnichannel Journeys - Generate cross-channel customer journeys
1. Generate journeys based on refined and suggested audiences
2. Select destinations for the journey, criteria for journey steps, length of journey (days), and number of touch points
3. Integrate experimentation splits to measure how different branches of your omnichannels are performing for continuous improvement
4. Automated Learning and Optimization - Use results from campaigns to increase suggestions, by default
1. Because GrowthLoop stores the results of campaigns natively in its customers' BigQuery accounts, it enables it to use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to optimize suggestions by default

"GrowthLoop's platform has made it possible for CMOs to anchor their first party data cloud strategy on Google Cloud with the full functionality of a CDP and the advantages of in-built cloud analytics and data science. I've met a lot of data-driven CMO's and the ones that are betting on the cloud are consistently the first to benefit and deliver business value from all the innovation happening right now in generative AI." - Yasmeen Ahmad, Managing Director of Product Activation, Data Analytics at Google Cloud.

"Marketers today are frustrated because they have 100 ideas, but the technology of today gets in the way so they can only run one of them at a time. We believe that Generative Marketing is going to fundamentally change the way marketers segment customers, personalize creative, orchestrate cross-channel journeys, and measure results. With Generative Marketing, now the technology melts away so campaigns can launch at the speed of the marketer and results can be achieved much faster" - Chris Sell, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, GrowthLoop

Onfido publishes 2024 Identity Fraud Report, revealing steep rise in deepfake fraud and other security trends and recommendations:

• Video spoofs now account for 80% of attacks against biometric defenses

• Digital forgeries have risen 5X from 2021 to 2023 as physical counterfeits decline

• 5am UTC is the peak hour for fraudsters

• Onfido prevented US$3.9 billion in fraud and uncovered 267 fraud rings in last 12 months

Onfido, the global automated identity verification provider, today announced the findings of its 2024 Identity Fraud Report and unveiled its Fraud Lab. The report points to the increasing availability of simple-to-use AI tools as the reason for a 31X increase in deepfakes¹ and 5X increase in digitally forged identities, making it easier for criminals to carry out sophisticated attacks. Onfido's Fraud Lab has been launched as a response to these trends. With the ability to mass-produce synthetic attacks, it delivers faster, more accurate AI-powered fraud protection to its customers through its Real Identity Platform, saving them over $3.9B in losses.

The fifth annual Identity Fraud Report highlights the increasing role of AI in perpetrating fraud, as fraudsters turn to online tools and generative AI, such as deepfake apps. Businesses are countering deepfakes by leveraging biometric verification powered by deep learning to detect the presence of a real person, which remains an effective deterrent, creating an AI vs AI showdown. This year, 'easy' or less sophisticated fraud also continued to rise, up 7.4% from 2022 and accounting for 80.3% of all attacks. This indicates a persistent trend of quantity over quality, as fraudsters look for minimum effort and maximum reward by launching multiple attacks simultaneously – enabled by broadening access to automated AI-powered tools.

"The confluence of cheap, genuine identity documents appearing on the Dark Web, combined with simpler and free generative AI tools, has created a gangster's paradise," said Simon Horswell, Senior Fraud Specialist at Onfido. "Creating large-scale, convincing attacks at the click of a button has never been easier for malicious actors, who increasingly use AI to attack en masse. It's become an AI vs AI battleground, where only defensive AI that's trained on the latest attack vectors at scale can keep up with the evolving threat landscape."

In the space of just six months, Onfido's Fraud Lab has helped improve its fraud detection rates on documents by 5X and on biometrics by 9X. Its team of experts, including former police and border agents, collect and label data while measuring fraud detection performance against multiple attack vectors on both document and biometric verification solutions. Training AI models to achieve optimal performance is challenging when only a few new attack incidents are available, so the team dissects the one or two samples they uncover, labelling their key signals. The lab's unique forensic environment then allows the experts to recreate synthetic derivatives, such as 3D documents or deepfakes in sufficient numbers to generate viable datasets for both training and evaluation. The lab also provides the ability to analyse the anatomy of global fraud rings, enabling Onfido to detect and stop over 267 to date.

"A machine learning model needs around 3,000 fraud samples for effective training. Obtaining these quantities in a short space of time used to be near impossible, which left businesses exposed," said Vincent Guillevic, Head of Fraud Lab at Onfido. "The Fraud Lab enables real-time data analysis for fraud specialists to identify fraud patterns and emerging trends, while allowing us to create as many as 10,000 synthetic IDs in as little as 30 minutes, so we can now train and benchmark our algorithms quickly and cost-effectively, to provide best-in-class fraud prevention."

Digital Forgeries and Video Fraud are developing, fast

As the increasing availability of AI tools makes digitally manipulated images even quicker and cheaper to produce, the Identity Fraud Report finds that digital document forgeries jumped 18% in 2023 – with roughly 5X more digital forgeries than observed in 2021, while physical counterfeits declined 17%.

According to Gartner®: "Although generative AI is not new, the accessibility of tools using generative AI and the public awareness of its capabilities have accelerated massively."²

Onfido's Identity Fraud Report also revealed that by far the biggest attack vector used to try to spoof a biometric liveness check is the submission of a video of a video displayed on a screen. This accounts for over 80% of attacks. In fact, video fraud has increased almost 4X year-on-year. This also reinforces the emerging trend of fraudsters turning to techniques like deepfakes or the lesser convincing cheapfakes as a means of attack.

Elsewhere, fraudsters have placed more emphasis on biometric fraud with the average rates twice what they were in 2022. Meanwhile, document fraud overall has levelled out to pre-pandemic levels as bad actors increasingly use a genuine document – obtained on the Dark Web – to bypass the document verification check and rely on AI to switch or swap the face for the biometric scan.

Onfido's Identity Fraud Report also revealed:

• National IDs top criminals hit list: In 2023, fraudsters targeted National ID cards more than any other document, accounting for 46.8% of all document fraud, followed by passports at 26.7%. Not all National ID cards are for international travel and therefore don't adhere to International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) guidelines, making them less robust in terms of protection, and easier targets for fraudsters.
• Scalable attacks launched on Financial Services: less sophisticated fraud accounted for 79% of attacks against financial services. By using easy and scalable models fraudsters are able to determine what sticks before using that loophole to attack en masse. The flood of attacks can also distract organisations from the rarer, but more sophisticated fraud.
• Biometrics see markedly lower fraud compared to documents: Biometrics still see a markedly lower rate of fraud compared to document-only checks — which see a 3x higher attack rate. This shows biometrics continue to act as an effective deterrent, particularly solutions with a liveness element.

Two Podcast Advertising Market Leaders Collaborate to Empower Buyers and Sellers Alike

Magellan AI, the world's largest podcast advertising database, has announced its strategic partnership with Sounder, a first-to-market AI-powered brand safety and brand suitability solution for podcasting. This initial collaboration provides advertisers with a holistic solution for comprehensive post-campaign measurement, with verification of ad placements in brand-safe and suitable audio content.

Magellan AI, as the leading platform for podcast media planning and measurement, will focus on delivering in-depth insights into campaign performance, audience engagement, and conversion metrics. Magellan AI's all-in-one platform empowers advertisers to scale audio campaigns with the confidence of accurate Return on Advertising Spend measurement.

Sounder, a trusted provider of brand safety and brand suitability solutions in audio, will specialize in ensuring that advertisements appear in brand-appropriate environments. In an era where brand integrity is the cornerstone of success, Sounder's suite of tools and services is the guardian against inadvertent association with unsuitable content. According to PWC and the IAB U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue Study 2023, utilizing brand safety and suitability solutions has nearly doubled YoY from 44% to 69% and 33% to 62%, respectively.

"Magellan AI is thrilled to partner with Sounder, and this collaboration underscores our commitment to providing advertisers with a complete, post-campaign verification solution," said Cameron Hendrix, CEO and Co-Founder at Magellan AI. "Now, our clients can access brand safety and suitability reporting alongside our industry-leading ad impression and reach verification."

Kal Amin, Sounder CEO and Co-Founder echoed the sentiment, stating, "The importance of brand safety and suitability cannot be overstated in today's advertising landscape. Our partnership with Magellan AI, an industry titan, empowers us to expand our reach and provide brands with the security they need to navigate the digital advertising realm."

The partnership between Magellan AI and Sounder enables advertisers to utilize a comprehensive solution under one roof, combining the power of attribution analytics with a robust suite of brand safety and suitability services.

Veritonic’s Long-Form Content Analysis solution now extends to video, enabling a wide range of Publishers and Creators to continuously optimize their video programming and uncover new audience insights

Veritonic, the industry’s comprehensive audio analytics and research platform, announced today an extension of its groundbreaking Long-Form Content Analysis solution to video. Similar to publishers of long-form audio content including podcasts and audiobooks, this cutting-edge solution now empowers publishers of video content including news, live TV, video games, films, YouTube programming, and more to unlock the full potential of their content.

By harnessing Veritonic's advanced long-form analytics capabilities, publishers can now achieve continuous optimization of their programming and gain unparalleled insights into what truly resonates with their audiences. From identifying trending topics to recognizing standout talent and optimizing commercial blocks, Veritonic's long-form content analysis solution is revolutionizing the way that publishers understand and engage with their audiences through video.

In the case of live news, Veritonic's solution empowers publishers to gain a comprehensive understanding of their rating spikes across both local and national streams. By leveraging long-form content analysis, publishers receive specific insights into the segment, correspondent, topic/subtopic, and individual words that drive ratings, eliminating the laborious task of manually sifting through vast amounts of content for data points.

Moreover, Veritonic equips publishers with the ability to analyze their competitors' programming, providing a crucial edge in the industry. Publishers can leverage the platform to effortlessly search by topic, talent, host, and date/time to identify the highest and lowest-performing segments. This strategic advantage enables publishers to maintain their competitive edge and optimize their content offerings while enhancing audience engagement.

“We remain committed to providing our clients with the actionable data and insights they need to make informed marketing and business decisions across all channels” said Scott Simonelli, CEO and Founder of Veritonic. “Where audio and video often go hand-in-hand, extending long-form content insights to video enables us to super-serve our clients, and to continuously innovate and evolve our proprietary methodologies and AI to support the provision of sophisticated data and analytics across all formats.”

Publica by IAS, a leading Connected TV (CTV) ad server owned by Integral Ad Science, today formally announced its new global partnership with Vevo, the world's leading music video network. This collaboration enables Vevo to improve their advertisers' targeting capabilities, enhance their streamed content with a traditional TV-like viewing experience, and maximize CTV advertising revenue via the introduction of a programmatic unified auction for the premium ad slots within their streamed ad breaks.

The partnership enables Vevo to provide advertisers with enhanced buying techniques similar to those of linear TV. This includes competitive separation, frequency management and the ability to purchase the first slot within ad pods, much like standard TV commercial breaks.

"As the Vevo catalog continues to expand, we are excited to partner with Publica to ensure that we are providing a high quality and curated best- in-class viewing experience, while ensuring that our advertising partners can effectively reach our global audience of music lovers," said Natalie Gabathuler-Scully, EVP, Revenue, Distribution & Data Operations, Vevo. "By providing advertisers with greater control and increased transparency, they can better optimize their CTV campaigns when reaching our engaged viewers."

Key Publica by IAS technology products that Vevo has implemented include:

• Advanced Ad Serving — Vevo has the ability to deliver advanced CTV ad breaks with the granular controls required by advertisers to target, and with the ability to optimize each slot by revenue per second within the pod.
• Advanced Ad Pod Decisioning — Gives Vevo the ability to guarantee an advertiser first pod placement, and own a pod by brand category, helping with competitive separation and buy side frequency management.
• Unified Auction — Enables Vevo to run a controlled, unified auction of all demand sources to extract the highest yielding ad per slot in each streaming ad pod. Vevo is also using the Publica 'Live Logs' feature to enable real time transparency into each of the programmatic auctions within which the company's inventory is cleared; this permits Vevo to optimize yield and data strategies in real time to ensure they do not lose demand to supply path optimization (SPO).

CTV advertising is escalating rapidly and poised to grow in 2023 to $25.9 billion, according to GroupM's mid-year forecast.

Publica by IAS has been instrumental recently in helping the IAB Tech Lab to build out the new protocols that bring increased security and targeting to streaming ad breaks via the introduction of OpenRTB 2.6, and also ads.cert 2.0 that secures the practice of SSAI. In implementing Publica CTV ad decisioning technology, Vevo can ensure its CTV inventory is being targeted and served in the most secure way possible, providing its advertisers with the controls and transparency they require. Advertisers have programmatic access to Vevo inventory via a number of leading global supply side platforms (SSPs).

"We're excited about our new partnership with Vevo, and we look forward to providing them with the ad decisioning technology to grow their global advertising revenues, offer outcomes to their advertisers and empower them with the ad serving capabilities to improve their streamers' viewing experiences on CTV," said Sean Galligan, CRO, Publica by IAS.

Named Best CTV Ad Server in the 2023 VideoWeek awards, Publica by IAS helps global publishers and TV manufacturers deliver a seamless ad experience to audiences via the introduction of Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), while also helping publishers maximize revenue by running a unified-auction between multiple SSPs and DSPs.

Over half of all consumers indicate concerns that GenAI outputs not informed by media companies will be inaccurate (54%) and biased (59%)

Overwhelmingly, consumers agree companies should be transparent about how they’re sourcing the data they’re using to train and power GenAI models

More than half (55%) of consumers surveyed believe they understand how Generative AI (GenAI) models are trained. However, nearly two-thirds (60%) were not aware that some media companies (recently, The New York Times) have restricted access to its information and data, including articles and general site content, in the training of GenAI models.

That’s according to a recent TELUS International survey of 1,000 U.S. adults who are familiar with GenAI.

On the impact of GenAI not being informed by media companies, over half of all consumers indicate concerns the content will be inaccurate (54%) and biased (59%). When asked what alternative sources they would most likely trust to educate and inform GenAI models, higher education institutions (48%) and scientific journals (44%) were the top choices. Conversely, the most untrusted sources were social media conversations (45%), reviews websites (27%) and brand websites (25%).

Transparency And Responsibility Lies With Brands

“There is growing concern by media companies and content creators about what becomes of their intellectual property when it is used as source material to train GenAI models, so naturally they are beginning to set guardrails. Many media companies have already updated their terms and conditions to include rules that forbid its content from being used to train AI systems and are blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their text, images, audio and video clips, and photos,” said Siobhan Hanna, VP and Managing Director, AI Data Solutions, TELUS International. “Given that we are in the early stages of developing industry regulations for all aspects of GenAI, including the sourcing of data, it's crucial that companies take responsibility to do the right thing from the very beginning. To protect themselves from potential fines, penalties, legal action and negative brand impacts, those working on AI deliverables must carefully consider where they are scraping or otherwise extracting the data from to power their models. Moreover, this is where a ‘humanity-in-the-loop’ approach to AI is so critical. Despite the fact that regulations and permissions around copyrighted material may still be emerging, companies need to consider the broader societal impacts of their actions to ensure that they are operating in a fair and ethical manner.”

No matter the source, 75% of consumers want companies to be transparent and explicit about how they’re sourcing the data they’re using to power their GenAI models. Additionally, more than half (52%) of all consumers believe the companies developing and building GenAI applications have a responsibility to “police” the information that’s being used and determine if it is being used with the content creator’s permission.

Consumers Unsure About Accuracy, Concerned About Bias; Sentiment Varies by Generation

• Those aged 25-34 had the most trust in GenAI-generated content being accurate (47%) compared to 16% of those aged 54+
• Nearly half (43%) of all consumers don’t trust GenAI content to be unbiased, with those aged 54+ having the strongest response (51%)
• Among those aged 18-24, 42% indicated they trust GenAI content to be unbiased, which is a stark contrast to just 16% of those aged 54+

“Since its launch a year ago, we have witnessed the unprecedented rise and development of GenAI. While many of the use cases are incredible, including its ability to fast track medical diagnoses and pharmaceutical developments, as well as aiding accessibility for those with disabilities, so too are the potential threats posed by its irresponsible use and the possibility of perpetuating and exacerbating false or biased data,” said Hanna. “To effectively mitigate against this and to ensure a safe online experience for all users, companies must source trusted and diverse training datasets created by leveraging a combination of technology and humans to oversee the output when deploying GenAI.”

Independent audit confirms Vouched meets the highest standards for Security, Availability, Confidentiality and Privacy

Vouched, an AI-driven identity verification platform, today announced that the company has successfully completed a System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type II audit and achieved compliance. The certification is a reflection of Vouched's commitment to protecting its customers' data and maintaining high information security standards. The audit was independently performed by Sensiba LLP.

Developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the SOC 2 Type II information security audit provides a report on the examination of controls relevant to the trust services criteria categories covering security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. A SOC 2 Type II report describes a service organization's systems, whether the design of specified controls meets the relevant trust services categories, and assesses the effectiveness of those controls over a specified period of time. Vouched's SOC 2 Type II report did not have any noted exceptions and was therefore issued with a "clean" audit opinion from Sensiba.

"Amidst an ever-evolving digital landscape, trust and security form the bedrock of our customer relationships," said John Baird, CEO of Vouched. "This latest certification is more than a badge, it's our pledge to uphold the highest security standards and ensure peace of mind for our partners and their customers. Vouched is not just meeting but exceeding industry benchmarks, further solidifying the trust placed in our AI-based identity verification solution."