Why Compliance Must Be a Priority In Your Cannabis Business Plan

Throughout 2020, the cannabis industry saw significant growth. In Colorado alone, sales jumped 26 percent, reaching $2.2 billion by the year’s end. This substantial increase coupled with positive projections for the industry’s future has led many to launch their own cannabis business. While success may seem imminent, ensuring you’re fully prepared to take on fraud attempts is especially crucial as allowing it can lead to major legal and financial consequences.

If you’ve recently opened a Cannabis business or are in the process of creating a dispensary business plan compliance and risk mitigation should be made a priority. Here, we discuss why and how to make regulatory compliance an easy feat.

Protect Yourself

As a new legal business sector, cannabis is highly regulated. It is regulated to limit the amount of product a person can buy, and how old someone must be to purchase. A lapse in oversight could result in a fine, a business stoppage, or even a criminal charge against the business owners.

When minors try to make a cannabis purchase, the consequences of their actions can still fall on the business owners and employees. In Oregon, for example, the law states that selling marijuana to anyone aged 21 or younger is considered a class “C” felony, resulting in as much as five years of prison time and substantial fines.

How

Protect yourself with identity validation software. While it may seem like handing that duty off to a frontline employee would make good economic sense, today’s fake IDs can get by the human eye. In addition, that process would not work online. As a result, it is best, at the dispensary and at the point of delivery, to use technology to scan IDs to determine if they are fake. Online, facial match is a good add on so you can ensure that the person presenting the ID is the one on the ID. These solutions can also provide good reporting that will prove useful to state regulators.

Better User Experience

Ensuring compliance is very important, but it is important to do it in a way that does not cause customers to give up and abandon their shopping carts. Solutions that disrupt the user experience can cost your company, valuable customers. This applies especially to online orders, where high friction can help ensure compliance, but it can also turn new customers away for good.

How

An identity validation process driven by highly accurate software helps ensure that additional security steps are not necessary. For instance, typical identity verification software is not very accurate, leading to additional steps to validate the document including manual review when the software cannot tell if there is an issue. These extra steps often require the customer to provide more information and stretch the process out. Choosing a solution that can be accurate from the first step is going to lead to the best customer experience and high security possible.

Start Off on the Right Foot

Thanks to rapidly evolving legalization laws around the country, the cannabis industry is poised for tremendous growth. Launching your own business in such a lucrative space can be a great idea so long as you fully accept the gravity of fraud prevention. However, a strong identity validation solution can help your company meet its compliance burden while also providing a good experience for its customers.

Intellicheck can provide the platform to make your identity validation accurate from the first step. Trusted and used by over 70 cannabis businesses, and over 50 law enforcement organizations in the United States, Intellicheck delivers 99% accuracy. This means that you can accept an ID with certainty that you are making the right decision. And, ultimately you can be certain that you are in compliance.