ID verification is an essential part of the KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements. When overlooked, organisations can face increased exposure to risk, lower productivity, and slower time to revenue. Automated onboarding has continued to gain popularity over the past few years, but what are the key benefits we can expect from automating ID document verification for KYC compliance?
Benefits of automating ID document verification include:
- Time and money saving: Automated KYC checks can be completed in seconds, freeing up valuable time for employees to focus on more impactful, manual tasks. By shortening the time between an enquiry to ultimate purchase, and significantly reducing the time taken to accurately verify the applicant, revenue streams can be achieved much quicker. This reduces your cost-per-sale and enables your teams to concentrate on the next opportunity, increasing the number of sales that can be achieved in the same timescale
- Improved reliability: Drastically reduce the risk of human error with information extracted and integrated into your database automatically. Not only will it significantly reduce the need for human intervention during customer acquisition, but it will also provide for an accurate onboarding, monitoring and remediation function, which are all essential when servicing and upselling
- Customer and employee satisfaction: Customers no longer have to wait for days for answers by eliminating the tedious and time consuming task of manual checks, leading to a faster onboarding process and decreased abandonment rates. Employees can both enjoy their work and see how that work is contributing to the success of the company, boosting morale. Automating systems that have become a burden to staff, to the extent, perhaps, where they no longer enjoy their job, or, worse, see little point in it, can be very detrimental to morale, fueling dissent, increasing staff turnover and reducing the whole company’s effectiveness
- Stay ahead of the competition: With more and more companies introducing automated systems for onboarding, companies who still rely on manual or part-automated processes will eventually fall behind. It’s a very competitive market out there and any edge that you can gain, whether by innovating to stay ahead of the market, or by introducing automation to keep up with the competition, will improve your business’ chances of competing in or leading the market
The importance of KYC compliance
The purpose of KYC is all about verifying the identities of your clients and customers, preventing the onboarding of people involved in fraud such as money laundering and other financial crime.
Regulated organisations use KYC to recognise and manage risk, as well as protect themselves from being used by criminals looking to move illicit money. These checks should be conducted each time you onboard a new customer (at a minimum), but KYC should be an ongoing process of checking and monitoring your customers’ activity for any information changes which could affect the level of risk they pose.
Firms must identify their customers and, where applicable, their beneficial owners, and then verify their identities. Firms must also understand the purpose and intended nature of the customer’s relationship with the firm and collect information about the customer and, where relevant, beneficial owner.
FCA https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/FCG/3/?view=chapter
Even if there is no legal requirement to carry out KYC checks, managing the risk of unwanted customers is as good a reason as any to ensure compliance. Not only this, but people may feel more comfortable and trusting knowing that your organisation is doing its best to protect itself and its customers from financial crime.
If KYC is not properly conducted, regulated firms can face substantial fines and in more severe cases, criminal prosecution. On top of this, the reputational damage could be enough to take down your business as a whole, with the possibility of making headlines and word spreading through customers, investors and other stakeholders..
Improve and accelerate the customer experience
We live in an ‘always on’ society where customers expect fast, and often immediate, responses. The old methods of onboarding customers are no longer acceptable.
Customer satisfaction starts with the onboarding process and to ensure a positive experience, there must be a friction-free solution in place. With automated ID verification, processes can be accelerated, workflows can be digitised and integrated into existing systems, delay between touchpoints is reduced to accelerate time to revenue and each step can be managed to provide an improved customer journey.
Traditional methods of ID verification are no longer sufficient if you want to achieve regulatory compliance whilst scaling and growing your business. The rise of international terrorist financing and increasingly sophisticated schemes such as synthetic identity theft have necessitated more advanced methods of ID verification. It is no longer enough to simply compare a person’s ID to public records because ID can be stolen or forged.
The next generation of ID document verification technology relies on facial recognition, but with a twist. To determine the authenticity of a person’s claimed identity, it requires the customer to provide two images: a form of photo ID, and a selfie taken in live mode.
Stay compliant with NorthRow
Automate your compliance processes and allow customers to self-onboard with real-time insights delivered to your compliance team to satisfy KYC and AML requirements. Removing costly manual reviews will allow you to spend more time growing your business.
Ensure your customers are who they say they are with our end-to-end Know Your Customer platform that can verify identities, documentation and liveness. Our software is designed for compliance teams so that they are capable of scaling at speed, regardless of size, volume or the complexity of the KYC checks required.
Continuously monitor customers for any changes in their risk profile, including scanning them in global sanctions lists, PEP lists, and adverse media data.
Reduce abandonment during client onboarding and instill trust by providing a smooth, frictionless onboarding experience to your KYC checks. Request your free demo today.
