The new funding, announced Thursday (Feb. 5), will help Duna as it works towards its goal of building a “global trust infrastructure” by offering a “digital passport for every business,” leading to “a network for shareable identity and one-click onboarding.”
Founded by veterans of Stripe, the company’s platform serves banks, FinTechs and other financial institutions, with customers that include Plaid, SVEA Bank and the Fiserv-owned CCV.
“Duna is addressing one of the internet’s biggest unsolved problems: identity,” says Duna founder Duco van Lanschot. “Compliance and identity now consume up to 10-20% of a bank’s total costs. The expensive and manual legacy systems lead to billions lost in fraud, friction, and fines, as well as lost income from refusals of legitimate customers. This makes it an ideal use case for AI automation.”
He added that the funding will help Duna further expand its enterprise capabilities with “compliant, auditable AI,” while still upholding the regulatory standards banks and large enterprises require.
Based in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna was founded by van Lanschot, who was head of Benelux and DACH at Stripe for three years, and David Schreiber, who ran Stripe’s largest global business unit, including the core card payment platform. Duna raised $12 million in funding last spring.
This newest round of financing comes at a time when identity verification has become one of the most significant, and most unrecognized, forces guiding growth, risk and customer experience for financial services companies.
“Most financial institutions express confidence in their identity systems. But that confidence often masks persistent friction, missed opportunities and measurable financial losses,” PYMNTS wrote last month.
“Digital channels now account for the majority of revenue for many firms. This increases the downstream impact of inconsistent verification results, excessive checks and manual reviews. These breakdowns frustrate legitimate customers during onboarding and create openings for sophisticated fraud schemes that increasingly evade traditional controls.”
Research from the report “When ‘Good Enough’ Isn’t Enough: Digital Identity Verification in the Age of Bots and Agents”, a PYMNTS Intelligence and Trulioo collaboration, shows that identity failures are no longer isolated compliance issues.
Instead, these failures can affect conversion rates, delay time-to-value, hinder geographic expansion and expose companies to regulatory and reputational risk.
“Firms relying on familiar vendors and incremental improvements may believe their systems are sufficient,” PYMNTS added. ‘Good enough’ is becoming a liability in an environment where bad actors move faster than controls from a simpler era.”
