Tim Ray is a serial entrepreneur and Angel investor with a passion for building and scaling innovative businesses from ideation, and a track record of successful exits.
Tim is passionate about the importance of creative “out-the-box” thinking, analytical decision-making and developing great relationships to solve complex problems and find winning outcomes.
Currently Tim is Co-Founder & CEO of VeriFast, the only all-in-one verification platform that helps companies verify an individual’s identity and financial details using consumer-permissioned data; reducing billions of dollars lost to inefficient underwriting and fraud annually.
Connect with Tim on LinkedIn
Richard Berman started his career as a professional journalist at the age of 14 covering sports and local news for his hometown newspaper, the Northern Virginia Sun. After earning a BA from the University of Toronto, he studied in the graduate journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University while writing for arts and culture weeklies in the US and Canada, such as Washington City Paper, NOW Magazine, and Eye Weekly, and also contributing to several shows for CBC Radio, including the first season of Vinyl Café.
After working for several years in the human rights field combatting the rise of fascist and neo-Nazi groups (where he contributed to several books on the far right), Richard did a quick detour through the world of academia before entering the world of high-tech marketing in New York, where he worked on the launches of several early dot-com successes. He relocated to San Francisco in 1999, and in 2003 founded VerbFactory after heading up communications for a publicly traded telecom software company.
In addition to running the agency, which specializes in business-to-business technology and has a deep focus in the property industry, for more than 20 years, Richard has always kept a toe in the journalism world. He continues to write for a number of business publications, including the San Francisco business times, and also contributes to newspapers and magazines, including the Toronto Star and the West End Phoenix.
Connect with Richard on LinkedIn
Interview Questions:
Q1: Can you give us a little background of the company and what you do?
Q2: What is the difference between fraud prevention and income verification?
Q3: How big is the problem of fraud in the residential property industry?
Q4: How did you come to the realization that the need for better fraud prevention is really a symptom of poor income verification practices?
Q5: Why haven’t the shortcomings of reliance on pay stubs been more obvious to property owners and managers?
Q6: How do you measure the impact of a more holistic approach to income verification?
Q7: What stands out as reasoning for why we’re seeing a rise in fraudulent reporting of income?
Q8: Why can’t property owners/managers just evict and re-rent?
Q9: What are the signs that a prospective resident may be a better or worse risk than a paystub would indicate?
Q10: How is Verifast leveraging AI?
Q11: Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper for property managers et al to request a potential resident’s bank statements, pull the data manually and enter it into a spreadsheet?
Q12: Looking at how technology and multi-family housing are evolving, what excites you the most about Proptech’s future and Verifast’s place in the multi-family eco-system?
VeriFast provides a single-source configurable API platform that allows companies to immediately validate customers’ ability to pay while eliminating fraud. Delivering deep analytics in minutes, VeriFast provides powerful consumer – borrower insights far beyond conventional credit checks. The company is based in Toronto and has customers throughout North America. VeriFast is privately held. For more information on VeriFast, please visit the company website at www.verifast.com.
Recent News: https://www.verifast.com/newsroom
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