When you think about high-stakes transactions between strangers, you probably think of property or financial services. But there is another market where trust is just as critical and the numbers are just as big: cars.
Australians buy and sell over four million vehicles every year. The average private sale runs between $25,000 and $75,000. These are not small purchases, and until recently, most of them happened without any form of identity verification. Buyers and sellers were essentially trusting each other on good faith.
carsales, Australia's number one automotive marketplace, identified an opportunity to reimagine trust in private-party transactions. The team designed a payments product to allow buyers and sellers to transact directly on the platform, with funds held securely until both parties are ready to complete the deal. Verification was a key requirement to enable an experience that was safer and more trustworthy.
To support this, carsales collaborated with FrankieOne on identity verification.
A trust problem unique to marketplaces
Most identity verification use cases are relatively straightforward. A bank verifies a new customer. A lender checks a borrower's identity. The flow is one-directional.
carsales faced a different challenge. It needed to verify people on both sides of a transaction, while balancing trust, speed and conversion - without compromising the marketplace experience that millions of Australians already rely on. A buyer browsing listings on their phone at 9pm is not going to tolerate a clunky onboarding experience.
On top of that, carsales is not a niche player. It’s the leading platform in one of Australia's largest consumer categories, with a brand reputation built over two decades. Any identity solution needed to match that standard - e seamless, reliable, and able to scale from a pilot in one state to nationwide coverage in a matter of months.
Why FrankieOne
carsales collaborated with FrankieOne because of the platform's ability to handle complex verification flows through a single integration. Rather than stitching together separate providers for buyer checks, seller checks, risk scoring, and screening, FrankieOne brought it all together in one place.
carsales’ engineering and product teams led the design and iteration of the verification flows and were able to integrate quickly, configure workflows for different user types, and adjust rules as they learned from early data. That flexibility mattered. carsales worked with FrankieOne to iterate, test, and refine as real users moved through the system and the product scaled.
Exceeding targets from the start
carsales’ payments product went live in June 2024 with a pilot in South Australia before scaling the feature nationally. Early results exceeded expectations with impressive pass rates from day one, supporting strong adoption and high customer satisfaction.
The FrankieOne and carsales teams have developed a strong working relationship. They have described FrankieOne as responsive, collaborative, and deeply knowledgeable about the identity verification space. FrankieOne and carsales continue to work together to deliver the next phase of their platform evolution.
Why this matters beyond automotive
The carsales story is significant because it proves something important about identity verification: it can create real customer value across industries and applications beyond financial services.
Any platform that facilitates high-value transactions between parties needs to think about trust. That includes property platforms, equipment marketplaces, luxury goods resellers, and peer-to-peer lending. The pattern is the same. Two strangers, a large sum of money, and a platform sitting in the middle that needs to protect both sides.
What carsales demonstrated is that verification can be introduced into a consumer marketplace in a way that increases trust and safety, while maintaining a seamless experience for buyers and sellers.
Scaling from pilot to platform
Following the initial pilot, carsales has rolled out verified payments nationally. FrankieOne has been able to support the scaling the product as adoption has grown across their user base.
For a platform that serves millions of Australians and operates internationally across South Korea, the USA, Chile, and Brazil through its parent company CAR Group, this is just the beginning. The infrastructure carsales has built with FrankieOne is designed to scale across markets and use cases.
"Building trust into the private party transactions has been a core focus for carsales. Verified identities is about giving buyers and sellers greater confidence when utilising the online payments platform, without compromising on convenience or experience. FrankieOne has been a key partner in helping us successfully deliver identity verification at scale.”
Ryan Svaghi, EGM - Consumer Product & Design, carsales
If you are building a marketplace, payments platform, or any product where trust between parties is critical, we would love to show you how FrankieOne can help.
Talk to the FrankieOne team.