Smile API Weblog

Hiring the right talent is crucial for the success of any organization. To ensure efficient and reliable employment verification, Smile API is proud to introduce the latest updates to its Employment Verification services, Smile Checks. In this blog post, we will briefly discuss what Smile Checks is and its benefits, and then delve into the exciting new features and enhancements that will revolutionize your hiring and onboarding process. Smile Checks: Simplifying Employment Verification Smile Checks, powered by Smile API, is an innovative solution that streamlines the process of verifying employment history, enabling companies to make smarter hiring decisions. By providing user-authorized access to recent, comprehensive, and verified employment data from multiple sources, Smile Checks offers a centralized platform for accurate and efficient employment verification. Without further ado, let's get started on what's new this quarter: Enhanced Branding and Security - To ensure candidates feel confident in sharing their data, Smile Checks now offers improved email invitations and landing pages with your company's logo. This branding enhancement instills trust, increases click-through rates, and maintains consistent branding throughout the employee hiring and onboarding process. Candidates can rest assured that their data is safe with you. Advanced Process Tracking Tracking the progress of candidates through the background check process is now easier than ever. Smile Checks has expanded the available statuses from two to six, including Invited, Email Opened, Landing Page Opened, Wink Widget Opened, Linked, and Revoked. With this detailed process flow, you can effortlessly monitor and stay updated on each candidate's journey. Personalized and Informative Invitations Recognizing the importance of personalization, Smile Checks has raised the invitation email and body length from 500 to 5,000 characters. This significant increase provides ample space to tailor your invitations, personalize messages, and encourage candidates to take the next steps. Leverage this opportunity to provide additional information and establish effective communication channels. Comprehensive Onboarding Flow - Smile Checks now offers a new onboarding flow that allows you to collect additional information about candidates beyond employment verification. You can easily gather educational attainment and other relevant details, enabling seamless matching and verification against verified sources via Smile. This comprehensive approach saves time and ensures a thorough assessment of candidates. Expanded Coverage and Verification Capabilities - To cater to diverse needs, Smile Checks has expanded its data coverage, from more data from existing sources as well as adding more data sources altogether. Employers can now verify more Government Loans with My.SSS and Virtual Pag-IBIG, facilitating seamless verification and accurate deduction calculations for new hires. Previously a pain point for many HR practitioners, now you can easily check for ongoing loans and make sure you remit the correct amount to the government. Additionally, Smile API has established a direct interface with the Supreme Court of the Philippines to verify lawyer credentials automatically, simplifying the verification process with no candidate login required. Furthermore, employers can now request Overseas Filipino Wo

We are thrilled to announce an incredible breakthrough from Smile API that is set to revolutionize the world of loan underwriting and pre-employment screening. Say hello to our latest feature: the Self-Background Check! At Smile API, we are committed to empowering individuals and businesses with innovative solutions that streamline processes and ensure accurate and reliable data. With our new Self-Background Check feature, users can effortlessly generate comprehensive background checks on themselves, simply by logging into their Philippine SSS, Philhealth, Pag-IBIG, NBI clearance, PRC, and other relevant accounts. Let's delve into the remarkable benefits this feature brings to the table! Hassle-Free Loan Underwriting: Obtaining loans can be a time-consuming and complex process. Traditional background checks often involve numerous documentation requirements, delays, and potential errors. However, with Smile API's Self-Background Check, users can generate a detailed and verified report of their employment and income data, eliminating the need for manual document submission. This enables lenders to make faster, more informed decisions, resulting in smoother loan underwriting processes and happier customers. Seamless Pre-Employment Screening: Businesses, large and small, understand the significance of conducting thorough pre-employment screenings to ensure the best hiring decisions. Smile API's Self-Background Check empowers job applicants to proactively present their verified employment and income data, enhancing transparency and trust. Hiring managers can save valuable time by quickly accessing accurate information, assessing candidates more effectively, and expediting the hiring process. Enhanced Data Accuracy and Security: Smile API recognizes the paramount importance of data accuracy and security. With our robust technology infrastructure, we ensure that the Self-Background Check feature seamlessly connects to trusted platforms, such as the Philippine SSS, Philhealth, Pag-IBIG, NBI clearance, PRC, and others. Rest assured, all data transfers and storage are protected by state-of-the-art security protocols, complying with stringent privacy regulations. Empowerment and Control: Our Self-Background Check feature places individuals in the driver's seat, giving them complete control over their personal information. By securely logging into their accounts, users can selectively share the necessary data with authorized parties, such as lenders or potential employers. This not only protects users' privacy but also empowers them to actively participate in the verification process. Time and Cost Savings: Time is money, and Smile API's Self-Background Check saves both! By eliminating the need for extensive paperwork and manual verification processes, our feature expedites background checks and reduces administrative overheads. This time and cost efficiency benefit both individuals and businesses, promoting overall productivity and growth. We at Smile API firmly believe that our Self-Background Check feature will bring a new level of efficiency, accuracy, and convenience to loan underwriting and pre-employment screening processes. By leveraging the power of technology, we empower individuals to take charge of their personal data while facilitating businesses to make well-informed decisions quickly. So, don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to simplify your op

Welcome to our latest blog post showcasing the highlights made by Smile API in the first quarter of 2023! As the most promising provider of secure and accurate data verification, we are thrilled to present our valued customers and partners with an overview of the latest product updates and exciting highlights that have shaped our journey during this period of innovation. Our dedicated team at Smile API has been hard at work, tirelessly pushing boundaries to enhance our platform and deliver an unparalleled experience to both end users and businesses. We continue to be committed to empowering businesses and fostering financial access in 2023. Join us as we dive into the remarkable achievements and advancements achieved in Q1 2023. Wink Widget Customization and Experience Improvements The Smile Wink Widget is what clients' customers see and experience, and we're dedicated to delivering the best performance and experience we can. Continuing with the Wink Widget 2.0 launch last year, we've improved the user experience for various flows in our widget, from document uploads, login assistance, and data source selection. We've continued to ensure users have control over their data by improving document revocation via the widget. We've also launched Wink Widget Templates early this year. - While the Wink Widget is customizable according to your business needs, launching a new user flow or adding new data sources have always required a full release to roll out to your customers. With Wink Widget Templates, you can manage all Wink Widget UI settings via the Developer Portal on the fly. No need for lengthy release processes if you need to change how your Wink Widget behaves - simply change it within the Developer Portal. You can customize many aspects of your user journey, from your company or brand details, data sources, call to action labels, and even which screen your user's consent is recorded. Finally, aside from regular optimization of our backend services to ensure that the widget is snappy and responsive, we've also focused on improving the developer experience for the Wink Widget. We've implemented two new tracking events: onUIEvent enables implementing in-house tracking and additional handling depending on where the user is in the widget user flow, to allow developers to retrieve more insights from user behavior and tailoring application behavior onUploadsRemoved is fired whenever the user revokes uploaded files via the Wink Widget, allowing developers to customize application behavior at this point of the user flow Developers are an important part of the Smile ecosystem, so we've also launched more improvements to help developers and Developer Portal users. Developer Tools and Portal Improvements We've released a slew of incremental improvements on the Developer Portal and other technical resources. Finding the correct data points you need is easier within our Data Sources section, even for documents and archives uploaded by your users. Managing and viewing archives and documents shared by users is even better, allowing developer portal users a better view of the data they have access to from the Data Sources page. The data points from these archives are also accurately represented in the Data Sources page to ensure developers have all the information they need to quickly integrate and implement. - To help with data handling, we've also added a new metadata field for a

Welcome to our quarterly product update blog post! As the leading API for secure and accurate data verification, Smile API is always looking for ways to improve and enhance the user experience. That's why we’re excited to share what we were working on in the last quarter of 2022. Our team has been hard at work preparing new features and improvements that we think you’ll love. So without further ado, let’s jump right in. New Customizable Web SDK That Increases Conversion Based on 90% worker coverage that Smile built in 2022, we're empowering our clients to provide services to these potential customers through the second version of our Wink Widget SDK. The new SDK focuses on many user experience improvements without compromising on performance, security, and its ease of embedding into any native fintech apps or finance applications. A lighter footprint, faster loading time, and flow improvements ensure that end users can quickly and easily engage with the Wink Widget -- enabling clients to get the data they need for critical underwriting and decisioning processes. - Smile has also focused on in-widget login support for the new Wink Widget, to ensure that end users have ample support when it comes to determining their login IDs and passwords without leaving the widget or app. In addition, we’ve integrated several new features that enable our clients to customize the Wink Widget even further. Wink Widget Templates let clients customize more of the experience, providing a seamless co-branded experience for end users that helps with conversion and trustworthiness. Reducing Non-Performing Loans Through Better Data Points Smile has helped underwriters reduce non-performing loans by over 60% through empowering end-users with sharing their employment and income data in a secure and user-permissioned manner. We've continued to make strides in improving our available data points to ensure you have the data you need. We've onboarded and deepened more data points in the last quarter of 2022 that assist in making better credit decisions for every underwriter. The additional data points and sources also open up other possible uses for this data, such as pre-employment screening and onboarding background checks. These data points include: NBI Clearance records Additional payroll systems Payslip data from available payroll systems Additional document type information on Documents data points Increased length of time to process archives We've also continued to improve on our estimated income data from government-mandated contributions, which we released earlier in 2022. We added derived data from Pag-IBIG contributions as well as ongoing improvements on income calculations. The various data points available and Smile's derived data help to unify and understand income data across all employment sectors. With this, risk managers and decision-makers can see a simple income per month data point as one solid basis for lending decisions. Development Tools to Make Life Easier We've made several updates to various developer tools and resources to speed up integration and onboarding. Smile is committed to making sure even your developers smile, and in that vein we've added three new sections to our Documentation: Solutions Onboarding Recipes - We've also beefed up our available webhooks to ensure you get the information you need when you need it. You can listen to the new TASK_STARTED and TAS

It's been another productive quarter at Smile API, and we're excited to share all the new features and improvements we've made to our platform. In this article, we'll outline each of the major product updates released in Q3 2022 and shed some light into improvements and fixes we've made under the hood to make sure we deliver the best value for customers and end-users alike. Highlights of Q3 2022 The product highlights for 2022's third quarter include: New APIs: Wink Widget improvements: New Developer Portal features and improvements: Documentation improvements: We'll go through each in more detail below. New APIs for Access to Better Data We've released new APIs to help you discover and use information from the data sources your customers choose to share with you. We've released the Estimated Income API, which provides an estimate of a person's current monthly income based on verifiable government-mandated contributions to social security and national health agencies. This API is currently in early access, which means that it may change before it becomes generally available. - Aside from estimates from contributions, we also surface estimates from alternative income sources that users may choose to share with financial institutions to further strengthen their credit worthiness. These income estimates from transactions on gig platforms are especially helpful when targeting the underbanked and gig economy workers. We've also started rolling out the Liabilities API this quarter, which provides information on your user's loans if they choose to share this data with you. - Lastly, making sure that end-users have full control of their data, we have also released the Account Revoke API, which allows users to completely revoke access to an account they have previously connected. - The Wink Widget SDK also automatically allows end users to revoke connected accounts. All account data is then removed from our system. Wink Widget SDK Improvements We've approached our Wink Widget with the mindset that it should meet financial organizations' requirements, ensure user experience and safety, and be as easy and quick to implement as possible. Aside from ensuring that users may revoke accounts easily to maintain control of their data, we've improved user experience with the display and presentation of our SDK's terms and conditions and privacy policies. Legalese are now shown within the SDK instead of being linked out, ensuring users won't feel threatened by unexpectedly being thrown out of the process of sharing their data to you. We've implemented additional callback functions for more robust error-handling and catching, as well as ensuring you get notified of pertinent user data information through our available webhooks. - Aside from adding webhooks for our new APIs, we've included webhooks for account locked events, and adopting an "at least once" delivery guarantee for notifications. Our SDK can now also pre-filter providers according to your requirements, if you wish to limit the data sources your users choose to share with you. New Developer Portal Features Our biggest update this quarter for the developer portal is the inclusion of a CV view of user data alongside the JSON formatted view. This makes it easier for both developers and risk professionals to quickly skim information that their users have shared with them, without the need for extra development. - An additio

We’re excited to announce a set of enhancements and new features for our product in Q2 2022. Highlights include: More data sources, including all of the Philippines' social insurance platforms such as SSS, GSIS, Philhealth and Pag-IBIG Additional data points to the API, such as contributions Support for automatic event notifications via Webhooks Ability to invite users to share their work-related information via email Visualization of user data in the developer portal Expanded information about the data sources we have, including supported data points and attributes And many more! Check out the full release notes below for more information. More Data Sources SSS, GSIS, as well as Philhealth and Pag-IBIG* Disclaimer: All trademarks, trade names, company/product names, brands and logos appearing on this page are the property of their respective owners. Use of them is only for identification purposes and does not imply any association or affiliation with, or endorsement by the respective owners. - In this release, we're adding support for all of the Philippines' social insurance platforms which, in addition to the SSS and GSIS, now include Philhealth and Pag-IBIG. These new data sources significantly expands our coverage, and gives you an even wider range of data to work with, including employment history information and contributions. The Philhealth is the country's largest social welfare program, providing health insurance to more than 96% of the population with an estimated 32 million direct contributors. Membership is mandatory particularly for those formally employed, with contributions ranging from 2.5% in the past to, recently, as much as 4% of income, with a floor and ceiling as far as income amounts for computing the monthly contributions. Pag-IBIG, or otherwise known as the Home Development Mutual Fund, is a national savings program that is mandatory for anyone earning at least Php 1,000 a month, that has been set up to provide affordable shelter financing for Filipinos. Employees contribute 2% of their monthly income with a maximum of Php 5,000 income for computing monthly contributions. Top Employers in the Philippines* Access to production mode, using production API credentials, are required to use this feature. We have also added a list of the Top 1,000 employers in the Philippines, to allow users to find easily their employer. For those companies not in the list, users are asked to input the name of their employer manually. Afterwards we then ask them to either: Connect their social security account, so you can verify the nature of their employment Present a file upload interface, so they can upload any employment or income-related document they receive from their employer, such as tax records or payslips This employer information shows up in the API metadata or the API results, and allows for employment verification checks or comparisons with data retrieved from their work accounts or uploaded documents. Filter list of data sources in the Wink Widget - We have added additional filters to sort through the different data providers list in the Wink Widget faster, and now includes: Employers Gig Platforms Government Services HR/Payroll Systems If you want to customize the list, we have added additional parameters to the Wink Widget SDK that can be used to customize the experience when launching the widget: including filtering the particular list of