Remote biometric onboarding, KYC growth appears sustainable as customers, FIs see benefit

Online account opening for financial services has taken off during the pandemic, and BioID, Smart Engines and Sumsub have all announced customer wins, but how sustainable in that growth?

Remote onboarding seems here to stay, as half of North Americans responding to a survey by credit risk company FICO say they would rather go through digital onboarding, using biometrics to protect their information, than open an account from a branch.

FICO’s ‘Consumer Banking Study’ shows that three-quarters of consumers will provide biometric data to their bank, including facial images fingerprints and voice recordings, to secure their accounts.

It also shows 41 percent of consumers are more likely to open a financial account online than a year ago, and 11 percent believe a fraudster has already opened an account by spoofing their digital identity.

If asked to switch to an outside channel during the onboarding process, one in four say they will switch to a competitor or abandon the application entirely instead.

The survey also indicates that people in many cases must learn new skills, with only 37 percent of U.S. respondents saying they know how to take a selfie within an app, and less than half are comfortable scanning their identity documents.

Digital ID adoption would improve the effectiveness of financial crime prevention across the financial services industry, according to another survey, this one from Duff & Phelps, A Kroll Business and reported by The Fintech Times.

Asked the greatest benefit of digital ID, 34 percent answered know your customer (KYC) processes, while lower operational costs and efficiency were cited by 20 percent, and 14 percent cited more robust verification processes.

More than half of financial services firms polled are paying above £150 (roughly US$209) to onboard each new customer.

The Investing and Saving Alliance (TISA) unveiled a new digital ID scheme at the Duff & Phelps event where the survey was conducted, which it says could cut onboarding costs by 50 percent.

Industry activity in the area remains heavy, with Innov8tif named among finalists in the Huawei Spark competition hosted by Huawei Malaysia. Innov8tif was honored for its OkayDoc KYC platform.

Innovatrics, meanwhile, is emphasizing the importance of document authenticity checks in the automated customer onboarding process.

In a post describing the limitations of smartphone camera capabilities and the necessity of data consistency for biometric verification, the company lauds the machine learning algorithms and capabilities of its Digital Onboarding Toolkit (DOT). Some documents have machine readable zones (MRZs) or RFI chips, while older documents have neither. Reading all of the above, and detecting forgeries, means using a dedicated document scanner, the company says.

Malaysian insure-tech selects BioID liveness detection

BioID has been selected by Malaysian digital insurance agent GFlex 40 to provide its biometric liveness detection for compliant fraud prevention.

GFlex40 provides an end-to-end digital experience for insurance customers, and the addition of BioID’s anti-spoofing technology enables it to complete fully automated, trusted processes, according to the announcement. BioID says its liveness technology complies with ISO/IEC 30107, and requires only two pictures taken on any webcam or smartphone to ensure the user is genuine.

The workflow also includes anti money-laundering (AML) and counter terrorism-financing (CFT) screening, and document authenticity verification.

“The collaboration with our partner BioID allows us to fully automate our application processes ensuring compliance with existing E-KYC regulations, including identity verification. This directly simplifies the sign up and onboarding process, further reducing the complexity of the insurance market”, says Sathiamurthi Ramanaidu, co-founder and CEO of GFlex40. “We are thrilled to finally launch GFlex40 as a key step to making insurance more accessible for all Malaysians.”

“The insurance market is yet another industry to adopt biometric identity proofing for more efficient processes,” says Ho Chang, BioID CEO. “BioID powers high assurance levels while substantially reducing identity theft, money laundering and other fraud, therefore we see the collaboration with GFlex40 as an ideal fit.”

Smart Engines document scanning integrated with airline app

Smart Engines is providing its automatic passport scanning technology to Caribbean Airlines to support passenger onboarding to its mobile app.

The Caribbean Mobile App is developed by airline industry technology provider 2e Systems, and now utilizes an advanced recognition and data extraction solution from Smart Engines to scan data from the passport’s machine-readable zone (MRZ) by pointing their device camera at it.

ID scanning technology from Smart Engines has also been integrated by Raiffeisenbank Russia for fast and precise extraction of data with its automatic passport recognition.

Smart Engines is providing its GreenOCR technology to the bank for on in-branch customer onboarding.

“When developing new AI algorithms, we prioritize the quality and speed of ID documents scanning as well as safety of the technological stack based on AI. Our technologies enable organizations worldwide to process client’s data in offices and in remote service in compliance with international and national standards,” comments Smart Engines CFO Nikita Arlazarov.

Sumsub signs up two crypto partners

Sumsub’s know your business (KYB) and AML screening, database checks and corporate document reviews have been chosen by global cryptocurrency payment solution MoonPay to improve compliance processes for its 250 partners, including Bitcoin.com, Trust Wallet, and ZenGo.

MoonPay customers can perform a two minute verification process for cryptocurrency purchases, customized for different regions by MoonPay through Sumsub’s dashboard.

Crypto-trading bot provider B-cube.ai has also signed on with Sumsub for KYC, KYB and AML checks, with new client onboarding with 5 minutes, according to a separate announcement.

B-Cube.ai is also launching an initial coin offering, hoping to raise $3.075 million.

Article Topics

BioID  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  FICO  |  identity verification  |  Innov8tif  |  Innovatrics  |  KYC  |  onboarding  |  remote authentication  |  Smart Engines  |  Sumsub