Lime meets international compliance regulations & converts more riders with Persona’s global onboarding solution

Lime is the largest shared electric vehicle company in the world. Its system offers dockless electric scooters and bikes that riders find and unlock via a smartphone app. Currently available in over 250+ cities, Lime facilitated a whopping 120 million trips in 2022 and is continuing to expand into new markets.

Problem: Lime’s previous age verification vendor was unable to help Lime meet unique compliance requirements in each city.

As a lead product manager on the city success team, Anissa Chen’s team is all about helping Lime be successful in the cities it’s currently deployed in — and any markets it wants to expand to in the future. “Cities are just as important a customer to Lime as riders — it’s really important that we listen to every city’s needs.”

While these needs vary, one major concern across geographies is safety, which involves ensuring riders are old enough to rent and ride the vehicles. “The legal age to ride a scooter or bike in most countries is 18,” Anissa explains. “To stay compliant, we need to prevent underage riding.”

Unfortunately, implementing a solution to deter underage riding is easier said than done, as Lime operates in a variety of cities and countries — many of which have varying requirements. “Over the past few years, the types of requirements around ID scans have gotten really complicated. In London, we do ID scans and selfies and can only accept driver's licenses. In Israel, we need to delete specific personal data.”

While Lime previously worked with another vendor to verify riders’ ages, the solution wasn’t able to handle the custom requirements for each city and use case, which created a lot of work for Lime’s team. “Customization was the biggest pain point we ran into. We were spending a lot of time on the engineering side building for all these custom requirements. Not only was that not the best use of our time, but it also made the code really complex and created a lot of technical debt.”

Additionally, the vendor’s struggles with document verification were hurting Lime’s relationship with both riders and some of the cities Lime was operating in. "Our previous solution was not able to accurately process the ID documents we received in some of our international markets, which led to significant rider frustration and friction with our city partners,” explains Anissa. “Ultimately, we decided we had to find a vendor who could scale with us."

Solution: Lime partners with Persona to create custom user-friendly verification experiences for each market it operates in.

After evaluating multiple identity verification vendors, Lime ultimately partnered with Persona for the following reasons:

Global age verification

First and foremost, Lime needed a solution that would help it accurately verify users’ ages all over the world and comply with each region’s specific requirements. “One of our main compliance goals is preventing anyone who’s underage from riding on our platform. Accuracy is really important to us, and other vendors were all talk,” Anissa explains. “The Persona team was able to speak to a level of depth about how they could meet our use case, and the product proved it. That’s why we partner with Persona to determine if someone’s over the age of 18 or not.”

To ensure compliance in each of its markets, Lime knew it needed to partner with an identity platform that would allow it to build custom flows for each use case. “Lime is a global company. We have a lot of different use cases — everything from the types of documents we accept to local regulations and the types of data we need to collect. Persona’s customizability stood apart — it was the best, most flexible option to meet all of our different needs.”

Ease of use for both riders and Lime’s team

While compliance is vital, it’s also important for Lime to make it easy for riders to get started — otherwise, they might choose another form of transportation. “One of our main OKRs is conversion — we need to minimize the friction we add for new riders who just want to start riding. The time that it takes for them to complete this process is really important for us.”

At Persona, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for real people to verify themselves online. That’s why we’ve built the verification experience with end-users in mind, offering features such as auto-capture, live guidance, and seamless device hand-off. Plus, our automated verifications can take just seconds, so users can get verified quickly and be on their way. 

Beyond the end-user experience, Lime's team was also thrilled with how easy Persona was to use on the back end. “Persona is a much easier tool for us to use. Now I can log into Persona and take a look at every single template. I can configure the verifications by myself. I can look up a specific inquiry to see what’s going on. There’s so much more detail that I can go into with Persona, and I’ve only heard great things from our teams that use the data,” Anissa shares.

Partnership and expertise

While Lime came for Persona’s global onboarding solution, it stayed for the customer service. “One of the things I love about working with Persona is the customer service is really great. Our partnership with Persona is better than I can say for some of our other partnerships.”

In particular, Lime appreciates how it can collaborate with Persona to figure out innovative solutions to problems. “Our customer success manager and solutions engineer are great thought partners,” Anissa says. “Whenever I get inquiries from teammates about whether we can use Persona for other use cases, I tell them to talk to our POCs at Persona, knowing they’ll give a buffet of options because they’re so knowledgeable about not only the Persona platform, but also how to apply features that exist to solve whatever problem.”

Result: Lime speeds up average verification time by 2.5x and verifies 17,000 more international users each month with Persona.

Since integrating, Lime has worked closely with Persona to continue bettering the user experience and increasing conversions.

For example, it recently launched a verification flow that only requires riders to scan their ID if their selfie suggests that they’re underage. “ID scans can be a tough rider experience. You might not have your ID on you, and you might not want to share such personal information with Lime,” Anissa explains. “As we serve a diverse age group, we wanted to see if we could use Persona’s selfie technology to predict someone’s age and then decide whether they need to scan their ID.”

Unsurprisingly, this lower friction selfie-first flow offers riders a better experience and has subsequently increased conversion for most riders from 80% to 93% and lowered the average time it takes for a rider to get verified from 80 seconds to 30 seconds. Additionally, Persona has helped Lime find more success in its international markets, where it has historically struggled — verifying roughly 17,000 more users per month and reducing the percentage of riders who scanned their ID more than once by 9.5%.

Perhaps most importantly, with Persona by its side, Lime can rest assured knowing it’s not only able to meet compliance requirements in the cities it currently operates in, but it can also handle any custom use cases in the future. “Compliance is king, and from a city perspective, it's binary. You're either compliant or you're not. And it's really difficult to predict what types of new use cases we'll get asked for,” Anissa explains. “Persona’s customizability doesn’t just help us meet the needs we have now, but also helps us future-proof for other use cases we know will eventually come down the line as we expand to other markets.”

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