OpenGrade

One bank connection.
Verified identity, scored trust.

A privacy-first platform on Israeli Open Finance. It proves a person is real, then prices their financial risk, without storing a single document.

Real-person verification 0–100 trust score Zero data stored

Amit Zamir · Noa Elmakies · May Gurevich · Hai Tal opengrade.cs.colman.ac.il

The problem

Not knowing who's real costs billions.

Marketplaces, merchants, lenders and landlords all judge people they've never met, with tools that are opaque, invasive or trivially faked. The bill arrives as fraud losses, compliance overhead and customers who walk away mid-signup.

$48B

E-commerce fraud

Lost to online payment fraud in a single year, up 16%. Merchants still can't tell a real buyer from a stolen card.

Juniper Research · 2025

$20B

Synthetic identities

Drained from financial institutions every year by people who never existed. Gen-AI made fabricating them cheap.

Fed. Reserve Bank of Boston · 2025

$64M

Identity management

Average KYC and AML spend per institution, per year. 70% still lost clients to slow onboarding.

Fenergo · 2025

51%

Bots outnumber people

Of all web traffic is now automated, and account-takeover attacks climbed 40% in twelve months.

Imperva Bad Bot Report · 2025

One root cause behind all four: there is no cheap, unfakeable way to prove a person is real and price their risk. So everyone over-collects documents, over-pays for manual checks, and still gets defrauded.

OpenGradeProblem

This isn't an inconvenience, it's a very expensive one. Online payment fraud took forty-eight billion dollars out of e-commerce in a single year, up sixteen percent, because merchants can't tell a genuine buyer from a stolen card or a bot at checkout. Synthetic identities, people who simply don't exist, drain over twenty billion a year from financial institutions, and generative AI has made manufacturing them almost free. On the identity-management side, the average institution burns sixty-four million dollars a year on KYC and AML operations, and seventy percent of them still lost customers in 2025 because onboarding was too slow and too invasive. And more than half of all web traffic is now automated, with account takeovers up forty percent. Four different industries, one root cause: there is no cheap, unfakeable way to prove a person is real and price their risk. So everyone over-collects documents, over-pays for manual checks, and gets defrauded anyway. That's the money we're going after.

The product

Verify the human.
Score the risk.

A consented bank login proves a unique, real person, then turns their real banking behavior into a 0–100 trust score. It is read in memory and deleted the instant it's scored.

Verify mode

Just the connection proves a real person. We read nothing, store nothing.

Score mode

Seven behavioral factors become a 0–100 score, then the raw data is deleted.

OpenGradeProduct

Why now · market

Open Finance just opened two markets.

Israel's regulated bank API (PSD2-style) makes consented, real-time bank data available, and by design it returns zero identifying information. That fits behavior-based trust and proof of personhood equally well, and it is available today.

Financial trust

Deep score for high-stakes decisions.

RentingLendingHiringB2B partnerships

Identity & personhood

Lightweight, high-volume verification.

MarketplacesDating & socialP2PKYC onboardingBot defense

OpenGradeWhy Now & Market

Why us

Built, validated, and live.

Learned, not guessed

Factor weights are derived by ML per use case, from 2,500 synthetic applicants using non-negative regression.

Validated on real data

Benchmarked on UCI German Credit (1,000 records). Beats the uniform and prior baselines on 4 of 5 use cases.

Zero-PII by design

Raw bank data is deleted in the same DB transaction that saves the score. Provable, not promised.

Deployed & running

Running live on a real bank integration with CI. A working product, not just slides.

7explainable
factors

5use-case
models

0PII / raw data
stored

<2mincreate check
→ score

OpenGradeWhy Us

Business model

Three tiers. One credit per check.

Customers buy credits up front and spend one per check, for a Verify or a Score. Declined checks are refunded, so you only pay for a delivered result.

Low cost

Marginal cost is about one Open Finance call

Two products

Verify and Score draw on one balance

Recurring

Monitoring re-runs checks on a schedule

SINGLE

₪40

1 check · pay as you go

Try it once, no commitment.

STANDARD

Popular

₪320

10 checks · ₪32 each · −20%

For teams running checks every week.

ENTERPRISE

Unlimited volume · custom rate

API access, SLA and volume pricing.

＋ Monitoring subscription · checks re-run daily, weekly or monthly at 1 credit per refresh · auto-reload keeps the balance topped up

OpenGradeBusiness Model

The model is deliberately simple: three tiers, one credit per check. Single is forty shekels for one check, pay as you go, for the landlord who needs one answer. Standard is ten checks for three hundred and twenty, which brings it to thirty-two a check, a twenty percent discount, and that's the tier for a business running checks every week. Enterprise is contact us: API access, an SLA and a volume rate for platforms doing thousands. Whether it's a lightweight Verify or a deep Score, it's one credit, drawn from the same balance, and a declined check is refunded, so you only pay for a delivered result. On top of that sits a monitoring subscription: a check re-runs daily, weekly or monthly at one credit per refresh, and auto-reload keeps the balance topped up, which turns one-time checks into recurring revenue. Our marginal cost is essentially one Open Finance data call, so revenue scales with usage while cost stays tiny.

Potential markets

One integration. Three markets.

The same bank connection is a product in every industry that has to answer "is this person real, and can I trust them?" Each one already pays for a worse answer.

$29B

Identity verification

Global market by 2030, up from $14.3B in 2025 at 15.4% CAGR. We enter as the cheap, document-free option.

MarketplacesDatingGig & P2P

MarketsandMarkets · 2025

$131B

E-commerce trust

Fraudulent transactions per year by 2030. Merchants pay on every wrong call, so a verified buyer is worth money.

Checkout riskSeller onboarding

Juniper Research · 2025

$51B

Financial trust & KYC

Global AML and KYC compliance spend by 2028. Scoring replaces statements, payslips and manual review.

RentalsLendingHiring

Fenergo · 2025

Beachhead → expansion. Start with Israeli rentals and marketplaces, where we are already live, then open the Verify API to e-commerce and lending platforms. Open Finance is the local flavour of PSD2, so the same product ships into the UK and EU without rebuilding the integration.

OpenGradePotential Markets

So where can this go. One integration, three markets we can sell into, and each of them is already paying for a worse answer. First, identity verification: a fourteen billion dollar market today, twenty-nine billion by 2030, growing at fifteen percent a year. We enter it as the cheap, document-free option for marketplaces, dating apps, gig platforms and bot defense. Second, e-commerce trust: fraudulent transactions are heading to a hundred and thirty-one billion a year by 2030, and merchants pay on every wrong call, so a verified buyer at checkout is worth real money to them. Third, financial trust and KYC, where global compliance spend is heading to fifty-one billion by 2028; behavioral scoring replaces bank statements, payslips and manual review for rentals, lending, BNPL, hiring and B2B credit. Our route is a beachhead and then expansion: Israeli rentals and marketplaces first, where we're already live, then the Verify API for e-commerce and lending platforms. And because Israeli Open Finance is the local flavour of PSD2, the same product ships into the UK and Europe without rebuilding the integration.

The team

Verify a human. Score the risk. Store nothing.

Amit ZamirBackend & architecture

Noa ElmakiesProblem & market

May GurevichProduct & design

Hai TalScoring & validation

CS finalists in the Fintech and Algorithmic-Trading track. We designed, built, validated and deployed the entire platform ourselves.

What's next : real pilots in rentals and online marketplaces, and an open Verify API for platforms.