Coinflow improves onboarding and reduces drop-off with Persona Connect

Coinflow is a leading payments infrastructure platform. Founded in 2022, Coinflow enables businesses to send and accept traditional fiat and crypto payments via instant settlement. Hundreds of customers across more than 170 countries rely on Coinflow to grow their businesses with innovative, reliable global payments.

Coinflow powers a litany of payment flows, many of which involve regulated activity, cross-border payments, and crypto-adjacent use cases. Naturally, compliance is mission-critical to the product. But as Coinflow added new global payment rails and blockchain partners, maintaining compliance became increasingly arduous.

Problem: a fragmented KYC process that added friction to payment flows

Consider a typical onboarding scenario: say that a small-business owner signs up for Coinflow and verifies their identity. To fund their account, they must verify their identity again. If they want to move their funds or initiate a payment, they’re asked to verify yet again. 

These represent just a handful of moments when Coinflow’s users had to reverify to meet Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. At best, these checkpoints invited frustration and added friction to the payment experience. At worst, they hindered customers from accessing the funds they needed to pay employees, cover expenses, and keep their businesses running.

“Repeat KYC checks were causing drop-off during onboarding,” remarks Abhey Sur, head of product at Coinflow. “Our merchants and end-users felt like they were starting from scratch every time they entered a new payment flow and had to redo KYC. The user experience was frustrating and confusing.”

For Coinflow, redundant verification created serious problems for its business:

• Drop-off during onboarding: Repeat KYC had a direct impact on onboarding drop-offs while creating friction for Coinflow’s partners. “If onboarding is slow, confusing, or repetitive, users churn,” states Abhey. Across the industry, it’s not uncommon for crypto users to abandon onboarding when asked to upload an ID and selfie they've already submitted elsewhere.

• Operational complexity: Managing these compliance flows took increasing levels of manual support to properly orchestrate, which cut into implementation timelines. “Redundant KYC generated significant issues for our solutions, support, and risk teams,” says JT Lang, head of marketing at Coinflow. “If a user was approved by one provider but not the other, it took a lot of time and effort to figure out why and reconcile the differences.”

• Stifled growth: For Coinflow’s partners and merchants, repeat KYC added unnecessary friction to launching new payment flows, turning compliance into a bottleneck.

• Brittle workflows and rising costs: Different products and partners had different compliance needs. But stitching together multiple verification tools or internal workflows to address them all had become untenable. On top of that, multiple verification tools meant multiple subscriptions and pay-per-use charges, which drove up unit economics. 

“We reached a point where scaling our products required a more centralized, scalable identity architecture,” says JT. “We needed a system that could grow with us, reduce redundant checks, and still meet strict compliance requirements across multiple use cases in a changing regulatory environment.”

To meet these compliance needs, Coinflow turned to Persona.

Solution: compliant identity reuse across partners and products with Persona Connect

In its search for a scalable compliance infrastructure, Coinflow immediately considered Persona and its shareable KYC product, Persona Connect.

“We already use Persona’s broader identity verification suite. Persona Connect was a natural extension,” says Abhey. “Connect directly addressed our biggest pain point: enabling identity reuse across products and partners in a compliant way.” 

Persona Connect works by letting Coinflow’s users verify their identity once and reuse that verified identity across Coinflow's entire ecosystem. It eliminates the problem of redundant KYC while maintaining strong compliance controls.

Although Coinflow considered other platforms, Persona stood out for the following reasons:

1. Speed to market. Persona offers a strong developer experience, which reduces the engineering lift required. "The ability to quickly implement a tool like Persona is crucial for us,” emphasizes Abhey. “Difficult integrations can drain our developers' time and slow our speed to market. Compared to building in-house, Persona allows us to move faster and avoid long-term maintenance risk.”

2. Flexible building blocks. Connect's architecture lets each organization design its own sharing network and choose which data to share, with whom, and under what conditions.

3. Scalability for future regulations. Persona treats identity as infrastructure, not a point solution. When Coinflow expands to new jurisdictions and global regulations change, Coinflow knows it will be able to adapt with Persona. 

As Daniel Lev, CEO and co-founder of Coinflow, explains, “Persona provides all of the building blocks to design your own flows while providing best-in-class verification. Compared with competitors, Persona’s flexibility and product depth are hard to match.”

Results: seamless onboarding and KYC as a platform capability

With Persona Connect, Coinflow has built a more seamless onboarding experience — a critical differentiator for a customer base that prioritizes speed. 

“From the user’s perspective, Persona Connect feels more like turning on a new capability than going through another compliance process,” says Daniel. “It speeds up activation, makes embedded experiences smoother, and helps reduce onboarding frustration.”

“We see fewer duplicate document uploads and lower drop-off with Persona Connect,” adds JT.

If a user verifies once to access a regulated flow, Coinflow can recognize and reuse that verification across other Coinflow-powered experiences. Additional checks occur only when the regulatory scope or risk profile changes. 

“Reverifying users across different flows was stifling the onboarding experience,” says Abhey. “Persona Connect gives us the flexibility to meet strict compliance requirements while still designing great user experiences.”

For Coinflow, Persona has shifted identity from a compliance problem into a platform capability. Coinflow has a clearer, more consistent view of identity across its ecosystem. Its solutions and support teams spend less time reconciling disparate verification systems and more time helping customers succeed. 

As for Coinflow’s partners, Connect has simplified integration and sped up launches. Instead of building compliance separately for each integration, Coinflow now has a shared identity foundation that works across all partners.

Take Coinflow’s partnership with InPlay, for example. InPlay verifies its users upfront through Persona when they sign up on their gaming platform. When those users go to cash out their winnings via Coinflow, InPlay passes a Persona Share Token to Coinflow. There’s no need for a second KYC check, which means that users can move seamlessly from gaming to payout without ever having to reverify their identity.

“Persona helped us turn KYC into a cohesive platform capability,” says Daniel. “Now our compliance flows feel more trustworthy, consistent, and invisible to end-users.”

Building the next-generation platform for modern money movement

As Coinflow looks to the future, it plans to add new payment geographies and other types of fast payments. The product team is also working on creating more detailed merchant orchestration and routing. 

“Persona Connect has changed how we think about our long-term roadmap for compliance, trust, and user experience,” says JT. “We can design more flexible payment flows, expand into new markets faster, and offer better experiences while staying compliant.”

“We need identity infrastructure that can scale with us,” concludes Daniel. “Persona provides that foundation.”