Mitek and Signicat partner to improve digital onboarding for European financial services

Jun 4, 2018, 1:30 pm EDT | Chris Burt

Mitek and Signicat have announced a partnership to digital customer onboarding processes for European financial services companies while helping the compliance efforts for regulations including PSD2, AMLD5, and eIDAS.

A report commissioned by Signicat, “The battle to on-board: The European perspective on digital on-boarding for retail banks,” shows that more than half (52 percent) of European consumers abandon onboarding processes, with the need to present paper ID documents one of the main reasons why. The same number said they would be more likely to sign up for a service with a completely online onboarding process.

As new regulations force institutions to apply rigorous customer identification, current on-boarding processes could become more cumbersome and act as a deterrent to new customers, according to the announcement. The companies are responding to this situation with the integration of Mitek’s Mobile Verify solution with the on-boarding engine of Signicat’s Digital Identity Platform, which enables users to capture their identity documents on a mobile device for verification by the institution.

“This partnership marks a watershed in the European identity market. Financial institutions can now on-board customers 100 percent digitally, doing away with the need to visit a branch,” René Hendrikse, VP and Managing Director, EMEA, Mitek commented. “With the arrival of PSD2 and increasingly stringent AML and KYC regulations, the ability to verify customers’ identity digitally is essential. Our partnership with Signicat offers one of the only platforms capable of this.”

Mitek expanded its European presence with the acquisition of AI and image analysis firm A2iA in May.

“Partnering with Mitek enables us to jointly offer European financial services institutions a customer on-boarding solution that is 100 percent online. Our customers will not only be able to benefit from Mitek’s Mobile Verify solution, but also Signicat’s secure authentication, electronic signing and archiving of sealed documents, as well as our integration with over 30 public electronic ID schemes and registry lookups,” said Signicat CEO Gunnar Nordseth. “The partnership is designed to remove friction from the customer on-boarding process to ensure financial institutions can effectively compete in the marketplace.”

Experian recently added Mitek’s Mobile Verify to its CrossCore platform to provide businesses with secure account opening and fraud detection capabilities.