Uber ropes in First Advantage to vet driver partners

BANGALORE: Taxi hailing app Uber has tied up with background screening agency First Advantage to vet all driver partners on its platform, following the alleged rape of a passenger by a driver on its network.

“First Advantage brings in additional layers of screening including address verification, a local criminal court search, and a national criminal database search,” said Deval Delivala, newly appointed India Safety Lead at Uber.

“The whole process takes a few weeks to complete depending on where the drivers are based out of,” 31-year old Delivala who is currently based out of Mumbai added that Uber is in the process of setting up a dedicated local team of specially-trained safety experts to detect fraud, verify and authenticate driver / vehicle documents.

“In Delhi, for example, we now only have driver-partners with fresh police verifications and have set up a dedicated local incident response team,” the Haas School of Business School graduate said.

First Advantage has worked with about 45,000 organizations worldwide processing over 23 million screens annually, according to its website.

All taxi hailing apps including Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure have taken aggressive steps to ensure customer safety is kept at top priority, after a 25-year old woman passenger was raped in a cab in Delhi in December.

These aggregators are doing everything from installing a double layer of GPS security tracking, panic buttons to third party background verifications and collaborative databases to ensure each and every driver on the road is verified and safe.

In January, India's largest taxi aggregator Ola said said it is investing more than $20 million in passenger safety related efforts and tied up with background verification agency Authbridge to vet its driver partners.

"AuthBridge has taken the mandate of verification for all drivers who are registered on the Ola platform, pan-India on a continuos basis. We have initiated thorough checks including criminal background, antecedents and police verification for every one of their drivers," said Ajay Trehan Founder at AuthBridge.

Jaspal Singh, cofounder of Valoriser Consultants, which provides market research services for transportation companies says that this initiative will make screening more stringent and will help to filter out people with an unclean record. “In developed countries, governments take it upon themselves to maintain a digital centralized criminal database. Currently, there is no modern centralized system for checking the criminal backgrounds of people in India.”

In December, Uber’s newly hired head of global safety Phil Cardenas admitted that in many places outside the US, the infrastructure and complexity of background checks vary significantly. “We are exploring new ways to screen drivers globally, using scientific analysis and technology to find solutions.”

The Indian taxi market is pegged between $6 billion ( Rs 36,000 crore) and $9 billion ( Rs 54,000 crore), of which only 4-6 % is organised.