Startup Aims to Make Online Shopping Easier and Sharing Personal Data Safer

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A project to get an official EU license, which covers crypto and fiat payments.

The Safein startup, founded in Lithuania in late 2017, has launched a beta-version of its platform that allows users to sign up to new websites and buy goods and services with just a couple of clicks. The Safein team plans to obtain an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license in the EU, which covers crypto and fiat payments.

Clicking in and clicking out

The startup describes itself as a "revolutionary way to pay online." The core idea is simple: a user creates a full profile at Safein, undergoes KYC only once, and after that can apply it to multiple e-commerce platforms. Moreover, Safein won’t provide the users’ personal data to any website without their approval, the company states.

According to the Safein website, the retail e-commerce sales worldwide will constantly grow from $2,290 bln in 2017 to $4,480 bln in 2021. As sales grow, consumers are having to make more and more accounts, and then often lose the passwords. Meanwhile, collecting and keeping personal data from all those accounts is pretty costly for the companies.

According to the Safein press release, onboarding new users can cost an online service provider up to $20 per new customer, with a total annual bill for identity assurance exceeding $3.5 bln in the UK alone. Even worse, in order to properly collect, manage and store the personal data collected, companies have to shell out even more.

"We're combining digital identities KYC and payment services in one platform, so nobody did that before," states Safein Co-Founder & COO Lukas Deksnys in a brief video interview. "We basically noted that there's a lot of inefficiency in the online shopping process," says Lukas.

An official license for crypto payments

According to the Safein official press release, the startup will be the world’s first payment service provider to put in the necessary paperwork and obtain the Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license in the EU, which covers crypto and fiat payments.

"Our main target is to eliminate useless registrations and KYC checks by allowing our users to only do it once on our platform and then using that data whenever you are using any online service," says the press release.

In early 2018, the Safein team released a beta-version of its platform with basic single-click login functionality. The beta-version, or as the team calls it, MVP (Minimum Viable Product), is available for testing at the Safein website, and Android and iOS apps. Each activity carried out by Safein platform users is rewarded with SFN tokens.

“In addition (to MVP), we have just launched an identity verification service inside our platform where users can whitelist for our ICO by verifying their identity within our app! They will be able to use the same account later on to participate in partnering ICOs or exchanges,” says the Safein press release.

Safein will launch its ICO campaign on April 25. The soft cap is 4,000 ETH and the hard cap is 12,500 ETH.