Carefree was founded in 2016 by two brothers, Charlie and James Ricketts, to support unpaid carers. Carefree transforms unsold hotel rooms into vital breaks for unpaid carers to look after their own mental health and well-being. The charity, therefore, must prove to its partners that these rooms are indeed going to unpaid carers. 

Having tested the concept in Cornwall and witnessed the extraordinary impact on carers’ well-being, the brothers moved their operation to London in early 2017 and began looking for seed funds. 

Being a tech-first charity, Carefree built a comprehensive platform that caters to all stakeholders: hospitality partners, community referral partners, donors, and carers. 90% of their platform is built on no-code software due to the company’s limited resources and lack of an in-house technical team.

The Challenge

Two years ago, Carefree had no verification solution in place. In order to scale fast, the company needed a fast and reliable provider that would be easy to integrate, given no engineers work at the charity.

Joey Ceunen

CTO at Carefree

Most of our carers are digitally excluded; they don’t have the skills to use technology, which is a problem as we don’t want to discriminate based on that. But in the end, we are a tech-first organization. So we need to be mindful of how we design the verification pathways not to exclude anyone and to make it easily accessible for anyone registering on our platform.

Why Sumsub?

Before choosing Sumsub, Carefree spoke with many different providers.

Joey Ceunen

CTO at Carefree

As we’re a charity, money and resources are tight. We barely survived the pandemic as once we wanted to go live, all of the hotels were closing, so that was difficult for us to keep running. Sumsub made a generous offer, and together with their scalable solution, it was a perfect match for us.

In 2021, Carefree partnered with Sumsub to onboard more carers to their platform and provide them with well-deserved breaks.

The Solution

Currently, Carefree uses Sumsub’s ID verification—a seamless solution for onboarding users worldwide.

Apart from ID checks, carers also need to prove their caring status. For carers receiving government allowances, verification is easier as they have to upload just one document.

The vast majority of unpaid carers in the UK are unregistered and unrecognized for their contribution to the social care system. Carefree aims to find these hidden carers and get them connected to much-needed support.

Joey Ceunen

CTO at Carefree

With such a solution as Sumsub, it’s much easier to sell to hospitality partners because we can show we have such a widget, which works as a great trust element.

All other carers undergo a different verification route, as they need to be verified by a third-party representative, such as a doctor. Usually, such ‘hidden carers’ don’t self-identify as unpaid carers. 

Once a carer’s ID and status are verified, an accommodation reservation is placed in their name.

Implementation

Once Carefree decided on the Sumsub user flows that worked best for them, the integration was done in several days.

The Results

Since integrating Sumsub, Carefree managed to grow its conversion rate to 94% and significantly decrease its median verification time from 3 minutes 30 seconds to 0.03 minutes.

Future plans

In 2023, Carefree plans to expand their carer base from 9,000 to 20,000 verified users.

Joey Ceunen

CTO at Carefree

And as our hospitality partners are happy with what we’re doing now, we might also explore Sumsub’s address and liveness checks later this year.