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Customers

Hyre

Owning a car offers freedom and convenience. But with that comes a long list of responsibilities and often unexpected costs. This can include anything from high insurance and maintenance costs to finding available parking spaces, unexpected parking fines, sitting in heavy traffic or unplanned damage to your car. Hyre was born out of the idea: what if you could have all the benefits of owning a car without the responsibility that comes with it?

– The first version of our Hyre app in Norway took months to launch, but the second we wanted to go into more countries, we just had to call Signicat.
Ola Gjønnes
Product Owner @ Hyre

#
The challenge

The concept of Hyre was solid but for the company to survive and scale they needed to ensure they knew their customers and they needed the ability to easily carry out identify checks. It wasn’t just about verifying who was loaning their cars, and that the borrowers were actually who they said they were, as well as checking that the person was over 18 years of age, and that they had a valid driving license and insurance.

Hyre couldn’t scale if it meant meeting everyone who signed up to borrow a car, exactly when they needed it, and in person, in order to sign contracts and hand over keys. As Hyre looked to expand from Oslo, into Stockholm and Copenhagen, this meant investing in more cars to their fleet, adapting to different identification systems to verify their customers, and understanding the bureaucracy of different countries. This could easily become a cumbersome process.

# The solution

Automation was the answer to Hyre’s challenges. They needed a customisable solution that could work cross-border and remove the much of the bureaucracy with scaling into new countries. Using Signicat’s digital identity solution, meant that Hyre’s customers could onboard to their service and log in with BankID in Norway, MitID in Denmark or BankID in Sweden. These national identification systems could automatically provide Hyre with immediate validation that their customers have a license, are insured, are credit safe, and over the age of 18. Importantly, this amounts to the driver being responsible, should something go wrong. “Now we can just focus on making sure that people have the freedom of driving without actually owning a car”, says Ola Gjønnes.

# The result

“Incredibly, just in the matter of five days, Signicat solved this intricate and very important log-in-process, something that normally would take up to half a year,” says Ola.

“Being able to trust a new driver's identity quickly, without ever meeting them in person, makes it possible for Hyre to say “Hey, in five minutes you can go from needing a car, to sitting behind the wheel”.