Gusto is the people platform that hundreds of thousands of small businesses rely on for payroll, benefits, and HR. For Senthil Sivasubramanian, Engineering Leader for Product Security at Gusto, that responsibility carries a straightforward north star: make security invisible.
"We think about trust as a product feature," Senthil explains. "Every identity verification moment is an opportunity to reinforce confidence in Gusto."
Because Gusto serves so many businesses, every point of friction is exponentially costly. Customers were hitting a wall at the account recovery stage, and the downstream effects included thousands of support cases, hours of lost productivity, and eroded confidence in a platform that small business owners depend on to pay their people on time.
"A slow or incomplete identity check during a time-sensitive account access moment is one of the highest-impact opportunities to either build or lose customer confidence. Maintaining a modern, seamless security experience is a competitive requirement in financial services – not just a nice-to-have."
— Senthil Sivasubramanian, Engineering Leader, Product Security, Gusto
Since implementing Prove’s identity verification solutions, Gusto transformed account recovery into a fast, low-friction, and highly secure experience. Customers can verify their identity in seconds with a simple input. Prove confirms identity behind the scenes using persistent trust signals for a seamless, low-friction experience.
Unlike legacy identification methods, Prove leverages longitudinal data including ownership history, tenure, and consistency to establish identity with far greater confidence than legacy approaches.
At the same time, Gusto strengthened fraud protection by introducing Prove’s TrustScore as a real-time risk filter. This allowed them to remove manual blockers, reduce false positives, and unblock more legitimate users while maintaining strong protection. After one year, Gusto observed zero account takeovers (ATOs) in Prove-verified sessions.
“With Prove, we replaced a slow, high-friction photo ID process with a seamless experience that made account recovery 10x faster while reducing support cases and strengthening security. More importantly, it allowed us to build trust with our customers in the moments when they need us most.”
— Senthil Sivasubramanian, Engineering Leader, Product Security, Gusto
For Gusto’s customers, account recovery is not a routine moment. It is often urgent and tied directly to whether employees get paid on time. When small business owners are locked out, they are not just dealing with friction. They are facing real consequences for their teams, their operations, and their peace of mind.
By moving to identity verification with Prove, Gusto eliminated the single largest point of friction in its recovery flow, the photo ID requirement, while simultaneously strengthening account protection. The result is a security layer that customers barely notice, which is exactly the point. Access is faster, friction is reduced, and trust is reinforced in the moments that matter most.
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