Document verification, which checks the authenticity of ID documents throughout the client onboarding process, can assist organizations in rapidly and securely verifying new customers. This is especially critical for businesses that deal with high-value transactions on a regular basis, such as banks, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency exchanges. When screening and validating new account applications, organizations like these need to know who they’re doing business with absolute certainty.
Importance
Document verification involves scanning official papers such as bank statements, driver’s licenses, and passports for holograms, watermarks, stamps, fonts, and other security features. Furthermore, the documents’ personal data, such as name, date of birth, and address, can be reviewed and authenticated against third-party data sources. This is especially important for businesses that sell age-restricted items and services, such as wine shops or automobile rental companies.
Document verification has developed as more customers contact businesses online. When registering a new account, it’s not commonplace to be asked to upload ID documents as well as a photo or short video to prove similarity. Consumers expect this process to be speedy, if not real-time, but delivering it at scale can be difficult for financial institutions. A team of employees is frequently necessary to manually validate ID documents. Not only is this time-consuming and prone to human mistakes, but the cost of having a workforce dedicated to this task can quickly build up and become prohibitively expensive.
The growing size and sophistication of identity fraud make this a more difficult task. It might feel like a cat-and-mouse game between businesses and fraudsters at times. Every step forward in identity verification is accompanied by a step forward in identity fraud techniques. It’s an endless race that keeps both sides inventing, but in the end, the technology always favours the good guys. As a result, several businesses are investigating how manual document verification might be automated to relieve employee pressure, improve customer onboarding, and avoid fraud.
Improving the Customer Onboarding Process
Many companies have been focusing on enhancing the customer onboarding experience in recent years by streamlining all stages of the customer journey to reduce friction. Customers value speed above all else, but it isn’t everything. Many clients are more concerned with trust and security than with the speed with which they can provide identification documents when opening an account.
According to GBG research, a customer’s decision to transact is influenced by a combination of speed, trust, and security. At the same time, this misalignment of expectations makes it difficult for businesses to know which customers to trust, while security concerns make some consumers nervous about opening new accounts or transacting online.
Many organizations have neglected an unexpected truth in their desire to reduce friction. Customers don’t just put up with friction; they anticipate it. It provides them with a sense of security and increases their trust in the organization with which they are interacting.
The true difficulty isn’t minimizing friction points; it’s about providing better service. To do so, firms must strike a balance between client convenience and identity fraud prevention.
Gaining Customer Confidence
Organizations are increasingly considering how identity verification services can be utilized to restore client trust while maintaining a convenient experience. Many businesses are investigating how document verification services can be utilized to give clients more trust while also assuaging concerns about onboarding the incorrect kind of customers.
Smart Capture, which uses the camera on a user’s device to automatically recognize an identity document type, and optical character recognition technology (OCR), which reads words printed on an identity document and uses this to populate form fields, are two of the most promising technologies. NFC and Biometric Liveness are two more potential technologies that combat fraud by ensuring that the individual requesting to register for a product or service is truly doing so.
Using technologies like these to check ID papers throughout the client onboarding process can help organizations assure customers that the process is secure while also giving them the information they need to trust newly onboarded customers.
Furthermore, these technologies can be adjusted and layered based on the attitudes of customers toward friction. For example, you may discover that elderly people prefer the option of manually filling out forms when opening accounts online, but younger people may choose to pursue alternate paths that utilize technology more.
