CHALLENGE

EU-only validation was a ceiling on international growth

Intercom is the industry leading AI customer service company behind Fin, the highest performing AI agent for customer service processes. As the business expanded internationally, so did its indirect tax obligations.

One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom, joined in September 2024 to rebuild the tax function from scratch. At the time, Intercom had a regional vendor handling VAT ID validation for a defined set of EU jurisdictions—but not everywhere Intercom was growing. 

As Intercom prioritized new markets for rollout, the question became whether to find separate vendors for each region or find one that could cover the EU countries already in place plus the priority markets ahead, and the longer list beyond those.

"As part of our expansion to validate tax IDs globally, we wanted to find one vendor that could cover everywhere we needed."
—One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom

SOLUTION

One API to cover every priority market, with documentation that made integration straightforward

One Jae had first encountered Fonoa years earlier while working at another digital services company where tax ID validation and transaction tax infrastructure were also core concerns. When the same problem resurfaced at Intercom, he knew exactly where to start his evaluation.

"There wasn’t anything other than Fonoa to consider for tax ID validation."
—One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom

Global coverage was the primary requirement. Intercom had a list of priority countries to go live with first, plus a longer list of future markets in view. The vendor had to support both without requiring a separate contract or integration for each.

Ease of implementation was a close second. Past experience with legacy tax technology had shown how badly a complex integration could slow things down. Fonoa's API documentation gave Intercom's engineers enough clarity to scope the effort before any contract was signed.

"The API documentation gave us confidence that working with Fonoa’s tech would be relatively simple and straightforward. Even engineers without a tax background were clear on what they needed to do to integrate."
—One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom

Because the API was straightforward to integrate, Intercom's team could focus their energy on building a validation process the whole business could align around: where in the product to surface ID collection, how to handle different validation responses, and what pre-processing to apply before sending requests to Lookup. Fonoa handled the technical complexity of validation itself, which gave the team the space to make those business logic decisions deliberately rather than reactively.

"The implementation experience was genuinely positive, responsive, timely and collaborative. Having a joint Slack channel was super helpful and all the team members have been very responsive."
—One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom

OUTCOME

Tens of thousands of transactions validated automatically, with 20+ markets queued for 2026

Intercom went live with Fonoa Lookup across 6 priority countries within 5 weeks.

Tax ID validation for those markets is now fully automated. The volume that runs through the system monthly, tens of thousands of transactions, wouldn’t have been possible to handle any other way.

"Tax ID validation at our scale isn’t sustainable to manage manually, Fonoa is the only way we can stay compliant globally."
—One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom

Since going live with Lookup, Intercom’s validation failure rate has dropped 58.8%. 

Fewer errors at the point of collection means cleaner data downstream, and cleaner data means the team rarely needs to step in and fix what the system already caught. B2B customers being incorrectly charged tax because no ID was collected is no longer an issue.

"Fonoa is a tool we simply can’t operate without."
—One Jae Paik, Tax Director at Intercom

With the initial countries established, Intercom is planning to extend Fonoa Lookup to 20 or more additional markets in 2026.