Know Your Identity
The U.S. Bureau of Justice reported that in 2016, an estimated 10 percent of people aged 16 or older reported that they had been victims of identity theft over the last year. Unfortunately, there is little hope of improvement, and instead all of us are going to fall prey to one form or another by 2025, according to experts.
With cybercrime on the rise, security breaches became a particularly expensive issue for financial services firms, with the average cost per company being approximately $18 million.
The Cost of Client Onboarding
At the same time, the cost of client onboarding and customer due diligence has reached unsustainable heights, with several major financial institutions spending up to $500 million annually.
It is not only about the money, though: it takes 24 days on average for a financial institution to complete the onboarding process with some customer having to wait up to three months and longer. If you are not tied to one particular bank, would waiting that long to get through all the hoops be worth it?
If it was just the wait, customers might be willing to accept their fate, but the traditional process itself is full of obstacles. Completing endless application forms or producing information in the right format at the right time makes you wonder if the hassle is worth it.
Missed Opportunities
As a result, financial institutions not only spend enormous amounts of money, but also miss out on significant business opportunities. Customer onboarding needs to be as frictionless as possible because any hurdle that customers have to navigate provides a potential stumbling block that could result in losing them.
For many years, the industry has complained about this issue and tainted the compliance function. Speaking to people in business functions on the matter would regularly send shivers down their spines or make them want to run for the hills.
Join the RegTech Revolution
Thankfully, the digital revolution of financial services and related sectors has also transformed the way firms can go about their regulatory obligations.
Regulatory Technology, or RegTech, has produced numerous solutions that change the entire range of compliance tasks and beyond.
A Case Study in Frictionless Onboarding
Addressing the client onboarding process has been among the top priorities of RegTech firms ever since. A good example of how the progress in biometrics has reduced time and cost of the entire process and increased security and stability of client onboarding is Keesing Technologies’ AuthentiScan .
The product offers a seamless identity-proofing system that enables financial institutions (FIs) and other organisations to onboard new customers on-the-go. It facilitates the process immensely, as customers do not need to deliver identity documents to a branch, but can submit the required ID remotely. The solution walks the client the customer in simple steps through the process of taking a photo of an ID document and a selfie for facial comparison with the photo on the ID document. In order to ensure biological identifiers are from the proper user and not from someone else, liveness detection takes place through the analysis of eye blinking and lip movement — a simple smile suffices.
The addition of liveliness detection to the process especially bolsters security when onboarding customers remotely. Impostors would find it extremely difficult to impersonate the individual whose photo appears on an ID document.
Lastly, the ID document is then thoroughly verified against Keesing’s ID reference database, including information on more than 6,000 ID documents from over 200 countries. This process provides extensive ID document verification that can be trusted.
While RegTech is often a game for start-ups, in Keesing’s case, the company builds on more than one-hundred years of experience. That is knowledge that is extremely important to both ensure an AML-compliant model and create a frictionless process, made for accurate and reliable remote identification for customer onboarding.
This post is sponsored by Keesing Technologies. For more information on the company and its solutions, please visit www.keesingtechnologies.com. PlanetCompliance only publishes sponsored content from companies whose products and services we think our audience will find valuable or interesting. For additional information about we handle partnerships and content production, have a look at the PlanetCompliance Disclosure Policy, which you can find here.