In this episode of Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Simon Montgomery, COO at ID-PAL, the identity verification platform helping businesses confirm who their customers really are in seconds.
Simon shares how his journey from traditional banking into fintech and regtech shaped the way ID-PAL built its customer operations, how identity verification became a customer experience problem, and what it takes to scale a highly regulated SaaS business while keeping both end users and enterprise clients satisfied.
He breaks down how ID-PAL built automation without losing the human touch, how the team spots churn before it happens, and why operational discipline and company values drive long-term customer success.
What You’ll Learn
- How Simon’s background in banking, fintech, and operations shaped the way ID-PAL designs customer experience at scale
- How identity verification becomes both a customer success and product problem in regulated industries
- Why ID-PAL treats end users and enterprise clients as two distinct customer groups with different success needs
- How automation and human support are combined to scale without sacrificing experience
- How ID-PAL uses usage patterns, support signals, and seasonality to detect churn risk early
- What health scores and engagement metrics reveal about customer stability
- How onboarding teams across sales, CS, product, and engineering reduce friction for enterprise clients
- How company values and internal culture directly impact customer outcomes
- What operational excellence looks like in a high growth regtech SaaS
- How Simon approaches hiring, resilience, and leadership in a scaling CS organization
Key Insights & Takeaways
- Customer experience is both internal and external. Strong customer outcomes start with cross team alignment, shared ownership, and clear accountability across the company.
- Automation only works when paired with intent. ID-PAL removes repetitive tasks so teams can focus on high impact human moments that actually protect revenue.
- Usage patterns predict churn. Seasonality, engagement drops, and shifts in ticket volume reveal risk long before renewal conversations begin.
- Health scores must drive action. Neutral and at risk customers require proactive intervention before dissatisfaction becomes churn.
- Onboarding defines long-term retention. The first three months shape how enterprise customers adopt, integrate, and rely on the platform.
- Culture scales customer success. Shared values, transparency, and teamwork ensure every team member understands who the customer is and why their work matters.
- Operational discipline enables growth. Root cause analysis, ticket prioritization, and automation keep service quality high while revenue scales.
- Leadership starts with understanding. Knowing the product and the people allows leaders to make decisions that improve both customer outcomes and business performance.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:30)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Simon Montgomery, COO at ID-PAL, a company that helps businesses verify identities in a way that’s fast, secure, and genuinely customer-friendly. Simon, I’m really happy to have you here.
Thanks for joining!
Simon (0:31 – 0:34)
It’s fantastic to be here. Thank you very much, Irina. Looking forward to chatting today.
From banking to fintech: Simon’s path into identity verification
Irina (0:35 – 0:47)
We’ll start from the beginning. You started in banking, then moved into fintech, and eventually ID-PAL. What made you take that path and what pulled you towards identity verification?
Simon (0:48 – 2:49)
That’s a good question. Going back to the banking piece, I was lucky to work in organizations that provided incredible training. I worked in areas that gave me exposure to different aspects—risk management, general operations, relationship management, and sales.
So I had a go at all of it, which was great. The training I received was excellent. After 14 or 15 years at one of the largest banks in the country, I took a career break and went back to college.
During college, I developed an interest in fintech and disruptive technologies. Part of the program involved exploring alternative ways of funding businesses and improving processes. That led me to shift from commercial banking into operations.
I was running credit card operations for Bank of Ireland UK. From there, things evolved opportunistically. I started talking to people in the fintech and regtech industries.
I moved into fintech, working with a student lender platform, and helped scale that organization. Then I met our CEO, Cullum, over lunch. We got on well—shared views on working in agile environments, making quick decisions, and having lots of ideas and enthusiasm. We just clicked.
I’ve now been at ID-PAL for about five and a half years. I was employee number 11; now we’re around 70. I’ve been central to that growth. It’s been exciting—a role I genuinely look forward to every Monday, working with the team.
That’s how I ended up here.
What customer centricity looks like inside ID-PAL
Irina (2:50 – 3:22)
You are definitely, you have an interesting career path. And you are, I would say that you are lucky to find the team and the partner that matches your, that matches your views. Now I’m curious, how many of the corporations through a customer lens?
Because for a product like IDpod, where first impressions and accuracy are everything, what does customer-centric operational actually look like on the ground?
Simon (3:23 – 5:41)
There are two important distinctions to make. We effectively have two customers. We have built a platform to enable our customers to verify the identities of their customers in a really simple way.
That is what we do. The company was initially set up to produce an app to facilitate that process. On the end-user side, which is our customers’ customers, identities can be verified in less than 30 seconds. That includes capturing a document, capturing your face with a selfie, comparing the two, and running multiple checks in the background.
We aim to take the pain out of identity verification. Ten years ago, when I was running back offices in two different organizations, there were teams of people manually reviewing documents. They were getting copies of passports from branches and comparing them against utility bills or similar documents.
We have worked to make the end-user experience as smooth as possible. We also try to make our customers’ experience just as smooth. That includes making sure we have enough information about the use case and how they intend to use the platform.
Our app runs in multiple industries. It was initially designed to provide KYC services in finance, banking, and insurance. Now it is used in telcos, fund management, and education to verify student identities. The use cases keep growing because fraud is everywhere, and there is a constant need to verify identities.
New legislation comes in all the time. For example, the right-to-work legislation in the UK requires certification to verify identities. We aim to make everything as smooth as possible for our customers, from onboarding to ongoing support, and for their end users as well.
End users often use our product only once, unless they interact with another business that also uses our platform.
Scaling operations and customer success during hypergrowth
Irina (5:45 – 6:11)
You’re remaining on this practical side of things. You mentioned earlier that when you joined the team, you were employee number 11 and now you are more than 17. I assume that it’s scaled, the business scale, the team scale.
What changed the most inside the operational and customer success engine during the five years plus of hyper growth?
Simon (6:11 – 8:07)
It’s the number of people, that’s the first piece. But in terms of customer side, when I joined five years ago, having scaled one org, the big and important word here is scalability and sustainable scalability. So when we were looking at the design of what we were doing in terms of just pure customer service, forget about customer success and customer experience.
It’s like, how can we make things as easy as possible for our customers? So it’s about trying to affect sustainable scale. So when I went in and worked with the team, I was like, when we are 10, 20, 30 million in revenue, how much do we need to change?
Or do we behave like a large organization now? So we started to behave like a large organization now in terms of that scale. So bringing in automation.
So within two years, we would have had a customer experience team of 10, 15 people. We’ve still managed to work our way through with three, four people, even up to this point. For me, being responsible for operations, product and all those other areas across the organization, one of the big things that’s important to me is that I’m providing, that our teams are providing customer service excellence, customer success excellence, but doing it in an efficient way as humanly possible.
So making sure that you’re not scrimping on something, but you’re also not overspending. When we go back to then looking at that scalability, it’s looking like carrying out extreme and very detailed root cause analysis. Why are your customers contacting you?
What are the barriers that you can remove for your customer to use your product more efficiently? And I’m talking about our direct customers. What feedback are we receiving, let’s say on the app store?
Where are people struggling with the app on the app store? We use that in terms of even how we develop and build a product going forward. But it’s really about trying to make sure that you are automating pieces that can’t be seen, but making sure that your customers are still having that excellence in experience.
Automation versus human touch in customer experience
Irina (8:08 – 8:34)
What do you have in place to identify, because you mentioned automation, and I assume that you have some metrics or some elements in place that basically tells you this can be, or this part of the process can be automized. Or how do you take the decision of what goes into the automation and what remains as a one-on-one experience, where it involves or it remains with the human touch?
Simon (8:35 – 9:46)
Yeah, I think, again, that’s a good question. There’s a distinction with it as well. So if I just focus on our customers, our direct customers, the human touch is really important.
But what information can you get before your first meeting? Let’s say our sales guys have gone out, they’ve sold the product, and now we need to train our customer, our new customer on how to use the product, how to use the platform. How are they going to use it?
What are they using it for? How many people are going to use it? If you can get that information in advance, it makes your first training session much easier.
So if you have that information, which we use through a pre-formatted form that either one of our customer success team members or one of the sales people will fill out, it means that the training team and the customer experience team are able to pre-build the platform before that customer actually joins. And then that also will tailor a customer training for that particular customer. For the first three to four months of any onboarding, we operate a nurture program with our customers.
So there’s always somebody on the team that will answer any question that any of them have within less than, I think it’s eight hours, if not even quicker. So we’re always watching out for our new customers to make sure that they understand the platform.
Designing onboarding in a high-friction identity product
Irina (9:47 – 10:38)
Let’s you touch upon this. And usually onboarding is one of the foundation of every customer interaction. It is told that without basically onboarding the customer and adopting the solution, basically the renewal is at risk.
It is said that basically onboarding decides what happens at the end of the contractor term. And in a product like yours, it can be difficult to offer, I would say a wow onboarding experience. It’s always about where you can have a lot of friction points.
And now I’m curious, what did you change? Or how did you tweak? Or how does the onboarding process look like in your case per se?
And how did you know that it’s actually working?
Simon (10:40 – 12:43)
One of the elements that you always have to be careful of is that you’re not changing for change sake. And that’s definitely one of the adages that we would use in the team. But equally, sustainability of relationship is important.
And you are right, first impressions matter. And what happens in day one will affect how things happen moving forward. Let’s just say for one of our enterprise customers, because we cater for all company types.
But for one of our enterprise customers, we actually have an onboarding team, which is made up of the salesperson, customer success, customer experience. We have a solution specialist as well, and there’ll be somebody from the tech team as well. So we have somebody from every aspect of the organization that can help their opposite number on the other side of the organization.
We try to get things as well as implemented as quickly as you possibly can, and as an understandable way as we possibly can. That generally is where the nurturing period of three months comes into it. And then we also have a dedicated team that’s in constant contact with those customers that are integrated into the platform to ensure that there isn’t any issues that they’re having.
I touched on earlier on around that automation piece, and you’ve mentioned as it relates to making sure you’re not losing that human touch. We’ve tried to remove all of the elements, the fairly standard, bog standard elements of how to use our product to allow us to focus on those things that matter. When one of our customers ask one of their customers to verify their identity, they’re presented with, once they’ve gone through the process a pass, flag, or alert way of approaching the products.
If there is a flag or an alert, it means that there’s something wrong with the documentation or the way in which the selfie’s been taken. Our customers invariably will get in touch with us straight away, and we’re there to be able to help them through that process to identify, is this document that’s been provided a fraudulent document? Because that’s really what they’re trying to make sure is that the person that they’re dealing with is the person they said they are.
So we’re able to assist them through that process as well.
Spotting churn early through usage, engagement, and behavior
Irina (12:44 – 12:59)
And on the flip side, something usually shows up early before a customer goes off track. And I’m curious in your case, what early signals help you spot risk or churn before it becomes a real problem?
Simon (13:00 – 14:49)
I think back to the previous question, which has to do with this as well, ongoing monitoring of how they’re using the platform. I even get involved in trend analysis for our customers, just pick through and see, how is this customer using the platform? Is it consistent?
Does it match off at the same kind of time last year? Because some customers will use it in a very seasonal manner. And so, for example, One for All is one of our customers that provides gift cards and prepaid cards.
Their busiest time of the year was Christmas. So we know that during the year, they don’t use it that much. And then when they get to the end of the year, there’s a huge amount of activity.
Department of Justice is also one of our customers for their immigration program. That’s fairly consistent throughout the year. So if you’re looking at those customer types, you know that there is a trend associated with it.
Even if you look at somewhat smaller customers, the usage will move along. And if you start to see a drop-off that you haven’t seen before, then you know that there might actually be an issue. There’s the other leading indicators as well in terms of changing behaviors.
So some of the things that you might see. So for example, you’re starting to see a pick up in the number of support tickets that are being submitted. Does it mean that we need to offer a tune-up to that customer?
Maybe to bring them back to the product again and go remind them exactly how it works and how they can leverage it and how they might be able to use it in other parts of the organization. There could be elements where you’re seeing that they’re just dissatisfied with certain aspects of it, that it’s not providing them with exactly what they want. And we will, in as much as we possibly can, if a customer has an enhancement that they want made to a product, we will look to see, can we include it on our roadmap and try to deliver it as quickly as we can.
But invariably, there are some of the key signs that you’re going to start seeing is the usage, is the engagement, it’s the type of engagement, the tone of voice that’s used as well. Those support tickets are actually being raised as well.
Health scores and managing customer risk
Irina (14:49 – 15:00)
And all of those are accumulated into the traditional health scores for our individual metrics that basically you combined them in a unique way.
Simon (15:00 – 15:44)
Yeah, so we would use health scores across the org. So we’ve got our different rations for different health scores. If something is healthy, then it’s gone along okay.
But as well as one of those things is where you’re starting to see those neutral ones a little bit like how you’re looking at MPS, the ones that you really need to focus on are your neutrals to make sure that they’re start moving towards the greens. And those ones that are slightly unhappy is trying to understand why are they unhappy? Is it functionality?
Is it some elements that they’re just not clear on? The other side of it as well that can happen is we’ve got to change the personnel in a particular organization that hasn’t used it before, hasn’t been trained properly on it. That can also be a reason where you end up with some slight churn.
But we’ve been pretty lucky. We’re trending well below the industry average at the moment as it relates to churn. So we’re pretty proud of that right now.
Irina (15:45 – 16:18)
You, I think you are lucky. But I wouldn’t say it’s a curse and a bless in the same time. So you have an overview over all the customer touch points through your role.
I assume that this implies more challenging or tough operational challenges at some point. And I’m curious what has been one of the toughest things that you had to solve from an operational point of view at the ID-PAL?
Simon (16:18 – 19:39)
I think probably one of the first ones was trying to get to know about the ticket piece, start that automation piece when I joined at the start. So I’m trying to make sure that we are thinking in that scalable way, sustainable, scalable way. The other element is, again, as you grow, the people that join the team, it’s making sure that they also understand the focus on customer.
And it’s trying to create or make sure that circle is complete and making sure that all of our team understands, and this is from the development team to the product team, to your customer-facing teams, to finance, that everyone understands who the customer actually is and who they are doing this work for. So if a bulk ticket comes in, why am I working on this? How important is this customer?
I’m trying to put a face on the customer for all of your team. That has been, I won’t say challenging, but it’s just been part of the journey for us and how we adapt to that. One of the ways in which we have done that in the past is we’ve had a customer charter, which basically is an internal document for us, but it’s almost like the principles for which we live and die by in terms of how we deal with customer, that everybody knows what our commitments are to the customer.
And there’s also commitments that need to come from the customer on that side as well. And there’s metrics that we use, some of the standards metrics that we use to see is that actually working or not? How is your gross revenue retention?
How is your net revenue retention? How quickly are you responding to tickets? Are we spending too long on set five tickets, which are the easiest ones?
Are we not spending enough time on set four tickets? Are we focusing too much time and attention on some of the elements that aren’t gonna actually add value? So I won’t say it’s been challenging, but it’s definitely been one of those learning experience.
How do you take everybody on the journey with you? One of the core values, we have a number of values across the org. We call them the ident values.
And the first one is I is integrity. The second one is around dedication. The third one is around efficiency.
The fourth one is around being natural and being yourself. And the last one is about transparency. And that comes down to the trust piece.
So when somebody starts at Ideapower, they start with a hundred percent trust. But if we go back to everybody being part of the same service, this was the same cycle, the same part of the organization, same journey. When I joined, we have a lovely office in the center of Dublin.
And there was something that struck me, even with just the 11 people that were there. There’s a dishwasher and everybody helps to empty and fill the dishwasher. It sounds like such a simple, small thing, but the foundation of our values is around everybody emptying the dishwasher.
And that everybody emptying the dishwasher or filling the dishwasher is around, everyone works together. You support your colleagues. If someone needs help, you drop everything.
If you’re not too busy and you help them and vice versa, you ask for help. So those challenges or any of those operational challenges or bringing through customer success metrics or customer success challenges, they’re all underpinned by teamwork and everybody trying to face up to those issues together. But we have a very flat structure and the company, even with 70, we have a very flat structure.
I think there’s five or six on the executive team. And then there’s teams underneath that because we want to make sure that we’re hearing everything. Across the organization.
Building resilient teams and strong internal culture
Irina (19:39 – 19:48)
I want to remain on the team side of things. And I want to ask you what makes a team resilient and how do you build that day to day?
Simon (19:49 – 22:20)
Getting things wrong. It’s a bit like a cough. If you cut yourself, you have to let it heal over and scalp.
I think it’s really important to allow people to be autonomous, to do their job. Everyone that works for us is an adult and they’re hired on that basis. But you have to get things wrong.
You can’t learn anything if you don’t get things wrong. As they’re saying, perfection is the enemy of good. It’s getting something done, getting this in place and refining it afterwards.
And that doesn’t mean doing like a minimum biobiotic zero where there’s real massive bugs within a release. This is everything to do with what we’re doing around automations. It’s everything to do with across the org.
So I think it’s important to be able to get things wrong. Back to that element of everyone emptying the dishwasher. I mentioned earlier that I do trend analysis.
We all get our hands dirty. We’ll all get in and help across the organization. Even if we don’t necessarily know what to do, there’s a different function.
We’ll ask, we’ll get given a bit of training and we help out. Celebrating successes and acknowledging success is really important. I’m not talking about giving everyone a pat on the back because they’ve done a good job every single day.
There’s kind of an expectation of that, but it’s also gone, we did a good job. Let’s put our hands up and take a sec to celebrate that success. That, I think one of the key things is just to your question, it’s about team.
It’s about understanding what team is. That I was saying, there isn’t an I in team, but there is, it’s all about all of us. The success of the organization is dependent on every single person that’s in the company.
I’m providing encouragement as well. I think also it’s important to pick the right people. I know one of your previous guests talked about putting the right people in the right seats.
I think that’s fundamentally important, but it’s also recognizing that sometimes when people are in those seats, that they’ve something to offer in other areas as well and trying to build and nurture out any of those skills and also talking to them about what’s important, but where do you want to go with your career? What are the things you want to do next? What, I’m not talking about five-year plans here, but this is just about that trust element and also working with people.
That’s kind of the exciting part, community-starting scientists is the people piece as much as anything else and try to help people succeed and move forward and understand their role in the company. Because sometimes it can be difficult to figure out exactly what you’re saying.
Irina (22:20 – 22:43)
And when you are bringing someone new into the team and you go through the traditional or non-traditional recruitment process, what’s the one thing that you don’t compromise? When it, what’s that one thing that the candidate needs to have or without it, and without it, it doesn’t lend into the team? Important thing.
Simon (22:43 – 23:59)
The one important thing is understanding that the customer has to come first and that’s not meant in a kind of a, well, customer first, that’s every organization says that, but it’s understanding how the customer comes first, where they fit in the organization and as much as anything else. So that would be one of the uncompromising elements. The other side is scale up businesses like ours.
So there’s not any one thing, sorry, that’s one thing that I will say, there’s not any one thing in a company like ours as we’re scaling and growing and at a rapid rate, it’s really important for people to not have a switch off button because you need to bring your best selves to work. So one of the questions that I always ask and towards the final end, the kind of the culture style interview is to find out, to make sure that people have an outlet. For some people that’s video games, for some people that’s, we did a mental health day recently, for some people that’s walking along the sea when the sea is rough, they’re like the ionic therapy for some people that’s doing triathlons.
So it’s making sure that people have a way of getting away from work and also looking after themselves so that they bring their best selves to work. So they’re the two uncompromising pieces for me anyway.
Advice for first time CS and operations leaders
Irina (23:59 – 24:09)
And if someone is stepping into their first senior customer success or COO role today, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give them?
Simon (24:10 – 24:52)
Yeah, that’s a good question. And there’s so many ways of answering that question. I think about my own journey, it’s been circuitous, it’s not been straight, but I think first, one of the main things is really understand your organization.
Your organization should really be looked at like an organism to a certain extent. So understand your org and within that, your people and your products, because otherwise you’re going to be joining conversations. If you don’t understand the people and you don’t understand the product, how can you possibly input into what’s happening?
That would be the, I know I said one, but that’d be the two pieces that I think really hammer home that are important to understand your product and to understand your people.
Irina (24:53 – 25:08)
And to wrap things up, let’s look ahead. If you fast forward to 2026 and we only have one month, what are the big priorities that you want to nail, either for operations or for customer outcomes at IDPAL?
Simon (25:08 – 26:56)
So I think that there’s two items for me, as well as my role is slightly different to some of your other guests in that I have a series of responsibilities as opposed to just been around the customer success piece. Customer outcomes is one. And so just because we’re good at it now doesn’t mean that we can’t get better.
So it’s about getting more efficient. It’s about making that journey for that customer as predictable and as efficient as it possibly can, be that the end user or be that our direct customers. So it takes less than 30 seconds to verify your identity on our platform now.
It can take less. So how can we push that? How can we push the ease of onboarding for our direct customers?
So it’s really driving that, really driving that. The operational excellence is the other side as well for me. How do we get all the teams working even better together?
Making sure that whatever we’re building, that it is scalable as well. So again, always thinking about when we are that 20, 30, 40 million turnover organization, that what we’re doing now will benefit the organization in the future. Looking at automation workflows as well as part of that, be that internal or external, be that integrating into another platform.
Or, and then probably the last piece is regulation. While we’re not directly regulated, a lot of our customers are directly regulated. And so making sure that we are ahead of, or at least keeping pace with regulation, which we are doing quite well at the moment, to be able to serve our customers that are regulated.
So it’s just, that’d be the main things that’s, the main two things for me for 2026 that are important. And you are right, it is a month away, which is hard to believe.
Irina (26:57 – 27:10)
Simon, this was such a great conversation. Thanks again for joining and for sharing your story with us. And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in.
Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
