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.

One consented bank login answers two different questions — is this a real person, and can I trust them financially. Pick the depth you need. Either way the data is read in memory and deleted the instant it's used.

Verify mode

1 credit · ₪20

Bank SCA plus a 30-day activity peek proves a real, active person. Eight PASS/WARN/FAIL checks, no score, nothing stored.

Score mode

2 credits · ₪40

Six months of behavior across seven factors becomes a 0–100 score, then the raw data is deleted. Upgradeable from a Verify.

OpenGradeProduct

Here's the product. Same bank connection, two depths, two prices. Verify answers one narrow question: is this a real, active person? It leans on evidence the consent flow already produces — an email one-time code, a national ID entered at the bank, and a completed strong authentication at a regulated Israeli bank that has itself KYC'd the applicant — plus a thirty-day peek at account activity that rules out synthetic, mule and dormant accounts. Eight evidence rows, each a pass, warn or fail, and the outcome is verified, verified with flags, or not verified. No score, no ML, no documents, no selfie, and nothing stored. That's twenty shekels. In Score mode we go deeper: six months of real banking behavior, a transparent 0-to-100 trust score across seven factors, and the raw data deleted the moment we're done. That's forty. And a Verify can be upgraded into a full Score while the bank consent is still live, for the difference — no new email, no re-authentication. What you see on the right is a real screenshot of the running product: the client's dashboard, with their credit balance, their live checks, and the trust score that came back for each one. Every score ships with the factors behind it, so it's the opposite of a black box.

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 at ₪20 a check.

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. Two price points.

Customers buy credits up front. One credit is ₪20. Verify spends one, Score spends two, so each mode is priced for the work it does. Declined checks are refunded.

Verifypersonhood

1 credit · ₪20

Score0–100 trust

2 credits · ₪40

Upgrade

Verify → Score for the 1-credit difference

Low cost

Marginal cost is about one Open Finance call

SINGLE

₪40

2 credits · one-off

1 Score or 2 Verifies

Try it once, no commitment.

STANDARD

Popular

₪320

20 credits · −20%

10 Scores or 20 Verifies

₪32 a Score · ₪16 a Verify.

ENTERPRISE

Unlimited volume · custom rate

Verify-heavy pricing available

API access, SLA and volume pricing.

＋ Monitoring subscription · Score checks re-run daily, weekly or monthly at 2 credits per refresh · auto-reload keeps the balance topped up · Verify is one-off by design

OpenGradeBusiness Model

The model is three tiers and two price points. Customers buy credits up front; one credit is twenty shekels. A Verify spends one credit, a Score spends two, so each mode is priced for the work it actually does — and note that a Score still costs the client exactly the forty shekels it always did. Single is forty shekels, two credits: one Score, or two Verifies. Standard is three hundred and twenty for twenty credits, a twenty percent discount, which is thirty-two a Score or sixteen a Verify — that's the tier for a business running checks every week. Enterprise is contact us: API access, an SLA and a volume rate, and for a platform doing high-volume identity checks we can price the Verify side specifically. Declined checks are refunded, so you only pay for a delivered result. Two things make this work commercially. First, the upgrade path: a client can run the cheap Verify, and if they want to go deeper, upgrade it in place to a full Score for the one-credit difference. Second, monitoring: a Score check re-runs daily, weekly or monthly at two credits a refresh, with auto-reload keeping the balance topped up, which turns one-time checks into recurring revenue. Verify is deliberately one-off — re-proving that someone is a person on a schedule has no meaning. And 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 at ₪20 a verification, document-free.

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.