It’s been three years...

Three years ago, we launched Wedio. Over those three years, we have helped more than 5.500 of your visual stories get produced, reached an audience of over 85.000 creators with our educational content and expanded from a local Danish startup to an international platform covering multiple European countries.

Steve Jobs had a passion for revolutionizing the computer market, Isaac Newton for the laws of motion and Kanye West (or should I say Ye) for… Kanye. We at Wedio have a passion for visual stories and a desire to build a community where creators could meet, share and become better – together.

Becoming a global community

We started with a focus on gear to give upcoming creators the possibility of expressing themselves without compromising quality. Then we launched our learning universe, which keeps expanding every day with new types of content, and reaches people worldwide who want to become better at their craft.

And that is just the beginning.

Exploration of new ways to help storytellers made us be a part of the first-ever long distance triathlon in Antarctica. These projects inspire and motivate us to continue what we are doing, because telling stories makes us human and brings us together.

Dodging bullets

Every exploration comes with challenges, and we have had a fair share of them as well. The global health crisis hit all industries without exception and forced everyone to reinvent how we work and collaborate. Together with our community, we had to adapt and find ways to help productions stay safe and carry on. Last month Wedio took another hit as we were attacked by a few renters who committed fraud in London.

We as a community could not tolerate this breach in our members' safety and trust. So, we decided to halt all transactions on the Wedio platform until we could make sure to reduce these incidents to an absolute minimum. We took counsel from you — our community, who shared your experience and ideas about overcoming our safety concerns – we’d like to thank everyone who was in contact with us during the last month.

Wedio from the cheapest to the safest

Last month’s incident taught us that a wide-open door would inevitably be tempting to those with harmful intentions. Therefore, we decided to strengthen our defence against those individuals while ensuring these defences do not hinder the well-intended majority of you.

Wedio will remain the proponent of visual stories and storytellers, assisting with gear, knowledge, people, and tools so that great ideas can be shared with the world.

Internally, we have taken the necessary measures to mitigate the previous attacks on our members. To safeguard against future episodes, we will roll out updates to our rental platform during the first month of 2023 to ensure that you stay safe while exchanging gear.

This is what you can expect from the new, safer Wedio:

Faster and stronger member verification

We partner up with Trulioo — a global identity and business verification company that provides secure access to reliable, independent data sources worldwide. It includes elements of KYC, Document- and Liveness verification. The partnership between Trulioo and Wedio will help ensure the safety and trust among our members.

Acknowledging High-Value Rentals

We will introduce the concept of High-Value Rentals, ensuring that one member cannot rent expensive gear from multiple lenders in the same period.

Additionally, extra details and a deposit might be necessary when renting high-value equipment. These additional details should not be a problem for a well-intended creator, but they will be for fraudsters.

Better equipment coverage

Wedio will, from now on, cover rental incidents up to £20.000 without relying on external partnerships, who do not understand the specifics of the industry and take way too long to process a case.

We were deeply moved by some of our members who experienced fraud and had no other gear replacement to carry on with their projects, resulting in a budget hit right before the holidays. Months of waiting for a case to resolve should not be about us.

Additionally, we standardised the coverage for all rentals to include the day before the shoot (from 17:00) and the day after the shoot (until 9:00), so those who rent can prepare the kit beforehand, and lenders can lend again without interruptions.

You can find more information about the updated gear coverage here.

New gear coverage premium

To arrive where our community wants us to be, where we can offer reliable, personalised, and fast service, we also have to be sustainable. This means that Wedio will add a gear coverage premium paid by the renter to each transaction starting now.

This gear coverage premium will ensure that rental incidents will be resolved quickly and professionally without jeopardising upcoming projects that rely on the equipment.

Introducing Prime Badges

We know that many of you have excellent performance on Wedio and have a great level of trust, both from other members and us. The purpose of giving a Prime Badge is to highlight the solid communication and service others can expect from such a member.

In addition to this, as a Prime Member, you will gain access to a more straightforward process when renting or renting out gear.

We are also working on other Prime benefits that would make your activity on Wedio smoother.

The Prime badge will be determined by an internal algorithm that will take the number of rentals, accept rate, reviews, membership seniority, among other things, into consideration.

What you can expect during the transition period

Before all these initiatives and automations go live, you can experience slower response times, and sometimes Wedio could intervene to stop a suspicious rental. This is to ensure that the level of security stays high, even before the above-mentioned safeguards are in place.

There will be other more minor updates like a rental extension feature, automating the completion of a rental so that the lenders get paid as soon as a rental is over, and more.

All these should culminate with us having the safest platform for gear sharing.

Help us become better and even safer

Your opinion is valuable for our development, so we would like to hear from you. What do you think about our planned updates? How are they going to affect your interaction with Wedio? What else can we do to make our platform better for you?

Fill in the short survey and be part of the change.

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