How Honey Badger Used LexisNexis TraceIQ to Increase Age Verification Coverage by Up to 60% and Keep Young People Safe Online

THE CHALLENGEs

Keeping young and vulnerable users safe online is a universally shared responsibility. More than 70% of 8-17-year-olds in the UK use social media platforms that fall within the scope of the Online Safety Act. Implementing strong age verification protocols reinforces brand reputation while reducing the costly risks of noncompliance fines that could total 10% of global annual revenue, up to £18m.

The main challenges were to:

• Deliver real-time, deterministic age verification
• Support seamless high-volume throughput
• Expedite customer onboarding and control friction
• Reduce drop off and raise conversion rates
• Enable scalable, accessible, cost-efficient checks

THE SOLUTION

Honey Badger is a UK and US-based provider of flexible, easy-to-deploy decisioning technology supporting expedited journeys at every stage of the customer life cycle. In 2025, the company launched a real-time age verification solution to help businesses across multiple industries comply with the UK Online Safety Act.

Honey Badger integrated access to TraceIQ as a component of its extensive suite of insights that power age verification checks. Honey Badger is committed to providing rapidly deployed, frictionless and scalable age verification tools that prevent underage access to harmful online content and enable users to prioritise their compliance obligations. The tools leverage TraceIQ to gather risk insights from data points such as phone, email, name or address, matched against high-quality, public, proprietary and contributory data sources.

Honey Badger expedites age verification processes by utilising the TraceIQ solution’s extensive supplementary risk insights, matched against high-quality public, proprietary and contributory data sources, to help accurately determine whether an individual is of an appropriate age.

The company’s proprietary age verification waterfall determines the best method for verifying a user’s age and incorporates a confidence score for accuracy and decisioning. Integrating access to TraceIQ allows Honey Badger to increase its age verification coverage by up to 60%, in turn vastly expanding its addressable market in the UK. This allows a diverse range of businesses representing multiple use cases and industries to access an affordable, plug and play age verification tool.

THE IMPACT

Meeting the immediate market need for reliable and rapid age verification required for compliance with the UK’s Online Safety Act was the main driver for Honey Badger integrating access to TraceIQ. Its comprehensive, up-to-date data coverage from differentiated sources and reverse lookup functionality enables Honey Badger to expand the breadth and diversity of the demographic intelligence their age verification solution delivers. The TraceIQ solution’s ability to gather insights from multiple data inputs for age verification helps Honey Badger’s customers protect their end users’ privacy while also prioritising low friction, real time interactions that keep customer journeys seamlessly on track.

The success of the TraceIQ integration highlights a continuous and proactive collaboration between the two companies. Core teams put speed, flexibility and technical creativity at the forefront as they work together to define and optimise the specific data sources, data flows and matching logic to deliver realtime age verification at scale. The team at LexisNexis Risk Solutions developed custom APIs and optimised lookup processes to handle the high-volume, low latency demands of Honey Badger’s platform. Ongoing collaboration is focusing on evaluating performance metrics and refining data models and infrastructure to further enhance reliability, whilst adhering to current and future market and regulatory expectations.

Honey Badger’s solution leverages TraceIQ to deliver real-time age verification results to meet stringent requirements set by the UK Online Safety Act. The solution scales easily, enabling customers to strengthen online security, seamlessly manage peak volumes and stay focused on:

• Raising conversion rates
• Increasing customer acquisition
• Accelerating onboarding and transaction speeds
• Reducing attrition and abandonment
• Minimising friction for legitimate customers
• Realising greater cost efficiencies