Nextdoor verifies businesses 30x faster and strengthens trust and safety with Persona
Learn how Persona eliminates manual verification checks, reduces operational costs, and helps Nextdoor maintain a trusted environment for neighbors, public agencies, publishers, and local businesses.
Nextdoor is the essential neighborhood network for over 100 million verified neighbors, offering trusted local news, real-time safety alerts, neighbor recommendations, for sale and free listings, and events. Nextdoor connects neighbors to the people, places, and information that matter most in their local communities. In addition, businesses, news publishers, and public agencies use Nextdoor to share important information and engage with neighbors at scale.
Problem: Nextdoor’s manual verification process created operational bottlenecks as the platform grew
As with most digital platforms, trust is fundamental to whether people choose to engage on Nextdoor. The goal of the platform is to help people connect with those who live nearby, but those connections only work when neighbors feel confident that the people and businesses they’re engaging with are real.
If users doubt the authenticity of a post or business promotion, they’re less likely to participate. Ensuring that every participant is who they claim to be is essential for both safety and long-term engagement.
As the platform grew, this need for authenticity put increasing pressure on Nextdoor’s previous verification system. But its approach was time-consuming, making it difficult to keep pace with rising user and business volumes.
Before partnering with Persona, nearly all business verifications required manual work. The process involved searching Secretary of State websites, sending verification postcards in the mail, cross-checking business registration information, and evaluating documents — all without automated tools. And as business growth accelerated, support ticket volumes and training demands increased.
“The manual process was tedious and costly, especially as more businesses joined,” says Aman Grewal, technical program manager on Nextdoor’s Neighborhood Operations team. “Every new business increased ticket volume, which meant hiring and training more agents. Training agents to identify fraudulent documents took time, and there was a potential trust cost as well — approving a fraudulent business could harm credibility.”
At the same time, Mark Jaskolski, staff product manager for Trust and Safety, saw opportunities for “cohorts of bad actors to create fake businesses to commit fraud,” highlighting the dangers of a manual, inconsistent process.
With verification needs rising, fraud risks increasing, and the platform continuing to scale, Nextdoor began searching for an automated solution that could help it maintain trust without adding operational overhead.
We needed something with a high degree of trust, the right pricing, and easy integration — and we found all of that with Persona.
Solution: Nextdoor turned to Persona to automate business and user verifications and reduce operational overhead
After evaluating numerous vendors, Nextdoor partnered with Persona for the following reasons:
A flexible, automated approach to KYB and KYC
Nextdoor needed a system that could reliably validate users and businesses at scale. For Know Your Customer (KYC), that meant confirming individuals are verified neighbors, which is a core part of building trust on the platform. For Know Your Business (KYB), it meant ensuring businesses are legitimate before they can post or engage with neighbors. Additionally, the platform wanted to perform these verifications without adding friction for users or placing additional burden on agents.
Persona’s KYB suite helped Nextdoor move from manual processes to automated, high-fidelity verification. What once required time-consuming searches across disparate state websites now happens instantly through automated business registry checks, which validate a substantial share of businesses globally. Remaining cases flow through a streamlined document review process that preserves accuracy and reduces agent touchpoints.
“Persona gave us a level of trust and fidelity we didn’t have,” Mark explains, noting how previous methods relied too heavily on “user verification as a proxy for business verification,” which wasn’t sufficient. “With Persona, agents are entirely out of that loop,” he adds. “It’s a huge win for cost, operational efficiency, and user experience.”
On the user side, Nextdoor uses Persona as an escalation path for edge cases where its in-house, patented system needs a final, authoritative check. This allows the team to preserve its high standard for neighbor authenticity while minimizing friction for legitimate users.
Perhaps even more importantly, Persona has given Nextdoor room to expand its verification strategy. With access to higher-fidelity checks, such as TIN verification, adverse media screening, and industry classification, Nextdoor now has the flexibility to layer on or switch out checks as business needs evolve.
Persona gave us a level of trust and fidelity we didn’t have. It’s a huge win for cost, operational efficiency, and user experience.
A native Salesforce integration that keeps everything in one system
Nextdoor wanted to move quickly but had limited bandwidth due to major product launches and a subsequent restructuring plan. Rather than delaying the implementation, the team adopted a phased approach: integrate Persona through Salesforce first, then bring verification directly into the product over time.
This approach was only possible because of Persona’s native Salesforce integration. Automated flows trigger a Persona verification the moment a business initiates the process, route results back into Salesforce, and flag any cases that need agent review without requiring them to learn a new system or switch tools. “Persona’s native integration lets us remain within our existing ecosystem — no switching systems or retraining needed,” explains Aman.
The integration also preserved Nextdoor’s existing reporting, routing, and QA workflows, which was crucial during a period of shifting responsibilities and internal change.
Low-code tooling that empowers non-engineering teams to build custom verification flows
Nextdoor’s trust and safety team needs to be able to respond quickly to emerging fraud patterns and community needs. Persona’s low-code tools give these teams the ability to adjust verification logic and route applicants through the right pathways without relying on engineers. “We needed a platform that allowed non-engineering teams to build flows and make changes themselves,” Mark says. “Persona gave us that flexibility.”
This agility has been especially valuable as Nextdoor serves an increasingly diverse mix of businesses, from sole proprietors to SMBs and micro-entrepreneurs. Persona’s Dynamic Flow lets the team build custom flows for each type of business, fine-tune steps, add checks, or bypass irrelevant ones without waiting for engineering cycles — something that wouldn’t have been possible with the old system.
A partnership built on responsiveness and collaboration
While technology played a crucial role, the relationship Nextdoor built with Persona ultimately shaped its decision. Persona’s support during the evaluation and implementation periods gave Nextdoor confidence that it was choosing the right partner. “The tooling and price were right, but the deciding factor was that Persona was easier to work with,” says Mark.
Throughout implementation, Persona remained responsive and solution-oriented. This steady collaboration gave the team confidence that Persona would continue to be a dependable partner as its verification needs evolved.
At a time when budgets are tightening and companies are trying to do more with less, we chose to double down on Persona as a partner. We found enough value and improved the user experience enough that expanding our usage just made sense.
Results: Nextdoor verifies businesses 30x faster and renews its contract early to grow with Persona
Since implementing Persona, Nextdoor has significantly streamlined its verification process and strengthened its trust and safety operations. “For KYC, Persona has simplified agent work. They just review the results and take the next step,” says Aman. “For KYB, about 95% of cases are now automated. Agents only handle around 5% of exceptions where uploads fail. That’s a huge improvement in efficiency.”
By removing manual review from nearly every case, Nextdoor reduced its average KYB processing time from roughly six hours to just 10-15 minutes — almost 30x faster. This improvement allows the operations team to redirect efforts toward higher-value work instead of repetitive document checks.
Beyond speed, Persona has also brought a new level of consistency to Nextdoor’s KYB process. Aman explains that Persona produces accurate, repeatable results every time — something that wasn’t possible with human review. “With agents, there’s always a chance of error, and results can vary as people rotate or get promoted, or new agents join,” he shares. Persona’s low error rate gives the team confidence to let verifications run automatically in the background without constantly rechecking outcomes. It also reduces the QA and retraining burden that comes with agent turnover, allowing operations to rely on a steady, scalable process that simply works.
Even during organizational changes, including a major product launch and broader cost reductions, Nextdoor has continued to rely more heavily on Persona. “We’ve continued to increase our usage of Persona, which I think says a lot,” Mark says. “At a time when companies are doing more with less, we chose to double down on Persona as a partner. The fact that we asked to sign our contract about four months early — with increased usage — probably tells the best story. We found enough value and improved the user experience that expanding our usage just made sense.”
Looking ahead, Nextdoor expects its partnership with Persona to continue shaping how it builds secure, authentic neighborhood experiences. New requirements, such as age verification regulations, can be addressed through the same flexible platform that powers its KYB program today. As Aman shares, “The process is consistent, scalable, and reliable, and it helps us create a safer, more trusted community for everyone.”
