What it seems you’re doing is wasting time, money and creating a whole lot of unnecessary risk for your business. There is no need to fear or complicate the customer onboarding process. All you need is the right ID validation system or identity verification solution and you’re halfway there. But why aren’t you automated yet and onboarding customers? Here are three reasons why you may be avoiding the customer onboarding process.

Customer Onboarding: Budget Limitations

Even if you went the traditional route and did customer onboarding manually, that takes time and can cost you customers and money if the process takes too long. Some companies can’t see the dollar value of customer retention even though it costs less in advertising, paid search and retargeting than a new acquisition. For this reason, some companies forgo customer onboarding.

Customer Onboarding: Not Viewed as a Priority 

When you’re running a tight ship or your company is relatively new, you may not be aware that you should be onboarding your customers. In fact, according to Forbes, even some 18% of well-established companies don’t budget for customer onboarding.

Customer Onboarding: No Prior Knowledge

There are companies out there that still believe customer onboarding is just a matter of sending out a welcome email. There is no focus on following up, building loyalty, or even explaining what they do. And although 76% of companies know the importance of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), only 42% can accurately measure it and thereby know how to make it effective.  

Customer Onboarding: Five Risks of Inefficiency

First of all, let’s fix the knowledge gap with a quick summary of how customer onboarding works and why you need it.  

Customer onboarding involves helping your customer understand how to use your service, company and product offerings while fostering customer relationships and building loyalty. You can do this via different software applications such as emails, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems or through IDMERIT’s suite of identity verification solutions which were developed to make customer onboarding easier. 

When you don’t pay attention to your customer onboarding process or don’t even have one, your company is susceptible to compliance and regulatory fines, fraudulent behavior, and potential breaches. Listed below are the top five risks you face when not having a proper onboarding process for your business.

Losing Money 

Yeah, those unhappy customers aren’t going to complain. In fact, only 62% in the US reported that they didn’t return after a bad customer experience, 91% are just going to leave and probably bad mouth you with other prospects so you might want to reconsider fixing the inefficiencies in your customer onboarding process. Efficient customer onboarding can increase customer retention and acquisition rates. 

A 5% increase in customer retention can potentially increase profits between 25% to 95%, depending on how well you can implement your customer onboarding strategy. Existing customers are 50% more likely to try a new product than new customers. The dollar value of seeking new customers heavily outweighs the risk of removing the inefficiencies in the customer onboarding process.

Wasting Time

When your customer is frustrated by a lengthy processor isn’t even aware of what’s happening or what your product is about then essentially what you’re doing is wasting everybody’s time. (And that leads to losing money too by the way) This is no longer customer onboarding, it’s a hostage situation and both of you are now trapped. Your company is trapped constantly seeking new customers and those customers are probably trapped somewhere in the customer onboarding nightmare you created. Free yourself and your customers by letting us create an identity verification solution that will streamline ID card verification using IDMscan for a faster customer onboarding process.

Age Verification Scams and Identity Fraud

Without a proper ID validation system that can do proper ID card verification, you may end up susceptible to an age verification scam, identity fraud or if you’re in the banking industry, bank fraud. Identity theft losses rose to $56 billion USD in 2020 with $43 billion just from identity scams. Protecting your business from identity scams and fraud is not an option. Opting out of having an automated, secure, ID validation system is not wise. Reduce the risk of scams, keep the kids safe online and protect your business from fraud and scammers by using IDMscan integrated with biometric facial recognition, and team up with IDMrisk and IDMaml as an ID validation system that can scan government-issued IDs in seconds. These products speed up the ID validation process and reduce unnecessary bureaucratic forms. 

KYC and AML Non-Compliance

Since you probably messed up basic customer due diligence, it may be safe to say you may not be KYC and AML compliant. Being Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) compliant means you have proper identity verification solutions or id validation systems in place to perform ID card verification.  Having KYC and KYB compliance is part of being Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliant and mitigates age verification scams and identity fraud.

When none of these things are in place, you are not only susceptible to security risks, fraud, inefficient onboarding process but you also run the risk of AML non-compliance, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) non-compliance and hefty fines causing you to lose more money than the cost of simply setting up the ID validation system and developing an efficient customer onboarding process. If you doubt the risks, call and set up a meeting with IDMERIT and let us show you the facts on non-compliance and how you can get AML compliant with IDMaml.

Losing Customers

“Your mission statement may be on the wall, but your core values are displayed in the attitudes of your employees.” – Elle Clarke (CEO, Thrive Global) In an inefficient customer onboarding process, there is usually miscommunication and lack of training among staff. Part of the customer onboarding process is to ensure your team knows how and when to assist the customer. Lack of proper customer service training, product knowledge, post-sale support and technical know-how about the onboarding process, causes customers to lose trust in your brand and turn away. Not only that, 55% of them will return the product if they are not taught how to use it properly, costing you money and wasting their time. Save time and avoid the customer onboarding risks by reaching out to us and let us prove how IDMERIT can make the customer onboarding process seamless for you and your customer. 

Reducing Customer Onboarding Process Risks

To reduce those customer onboarding risks, there are a few features your customer onboarding process should have to ensure a smooth and successful onboarding process.

Clear Customer and Business Goals

Align your customer goals with your business goals and communicate clearly to ensure both of you want the same outcome and involvement. Paying attention to the level a customer wants to be involved in the custom onboarding process can help determine where to shorten the process or reduce or increase details. Show the value of the process, create customer success milestones and celebrate each step of the customer journey. This will help personalize the experience and generate excitement in your product offering.

No Unnecessary Information

The customer journey must be a delicate balance of holding their hand, but not treating them as if they are lacking brain cells to walk upright.  So, it is not necessary to spell out every little detail. Reduce the need to info dump and turn away fewer customers by treating them like the highly functioning adults they are. Provide accessible guides via tap targets and video tutorials that they can opt to read or listen to if necessary. Speed up ID validation by automation using a trusted identity verification service. After all, they were smart enough to choose you, right?

Clear Insights into the Customer’s Journey

The whole point of the customer onboarding process is for you to help your new customer understand your product/service and get acquainted with your customer. It benefits no one and its poor customer service leaves them on their customer journey alone. When you monitor them at each stage of the customer onboarding process, you will be better able to step in and direct them or answer any questions they may have. 

Mobile-Friendly Customer Onboarding Application

Having an automated system is great for you, but what about your customer? Can they access what they need on any device? Creating a mobile-friendly app for your company can help speed up the customer onboarding process by integrating it with mobile identity verification software. Being mobile-friendly also means having multiple onboarding options like self-onboarding or live online onboarding. Plus everyone knows mobile apps are the way of the future. Most Gen-Z’s and Millennials won’t adapt to a brand if they are not mobile-friendly. Using IDMERIT’s mobile identity verification software with IDMautofill makes filling out forms via mobile easier and helps your company adapt to mobile trends.

Simplify the Customer Onboarding Process

Please don’t have your new customer jump through hoops or run through a maze to understand what’s happening. Not only will you risk confusing them by creating bottlenecks and silos, but you also risk losing them, especially if you are still attempting to perform customer onboarding manually in this digital age. (Please stop!) Make the process interactive, clear up redundant requests for information, make sure your team is trained and has ready responses and follow the KISS model by keeping it simple, accurate. The simplest thing you can do is get a fully automated customer identity validation system and use mobile identity verification software from IDMERIT.

Make the Customer Onboarding Process Fun

Having someone read through a 60-page guide isn’t very appealing, and as mentioned before wastes time and can end up providing a lot of unnecessary information. 90% of people think businesses can do better with their customer onboarding process. So do better! Make the process fun. Encourage referrals with challenges and use gamification to help them meet milestones and reward them with prizes. Provide welcome packages or swag bags and use fun informative videos they can interact with. Once you make your customers love starting and finishing the journey with you by helping them understand the value of your company and the functionality of your product, you’ve done customer onboarding right.

Closing

Once you’ve created a customer onboarding system that is KYC and AML compliant with an ID validation system and mobile identity verification software to perform ID validation, you can measure your customer onboarding metrics. Pay attention to click rates, open rates, attendance and watch rates for demos and webinars. Measure all your pirate metrics, not just revenue, check activation, retention and referral, in particular, to see how your customer onboarding strategy is working for you.

Did you get all that? If not, don’t worry about it, you should just contact IDMERIT and take the guesswork out of customer onboarding metrics. Let us help you create an efficient onboarding process using IDMdevice to protect you from identity fraud and age verification scams, IDMaml and IDMkyc to keep you KYC and AML compliant and integrated with IDMscan for faster id card verification. 

Let us prove how you can have an efficient, mobile-friendly customer onboarding process without the risk through our identity verification solutions. Talk to us today!

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Customer onboarding is important for both your business and your customer. It must not be confused with user onboarding which is done mainly for employees and whose focus is solely on getting the user to know how to use your product or service.  Customer onboarding’s focus is on getting your customer to buy and ensure repeat business.

Benefits of Customer Onboarding

Increased Customer Loyalty

In an effective onboarding process, the customer’s problem is solved quickly and efficiently. Leading to a better understanding of your product or service which according to Harvard Business Review leads to increased customer loyalty. Apparently, customers just need to know how your product works and that it works well.

Better Feedback and Data Insights

Once you are KYC compliant, Know Your Customer compliance (KYC) provides a great opportunity to gain consumer data and have better insights into how your customer behaves. You can also use the onboarding process as an opportunity for feedback on your product/service.

Operational Efficiency

Automating your onboarding process can save your company time, overhead costs and service loads. Having automated KYC checks, email verification software and automated AML solutions with basic customer due to diligence can speed up the process and customers who understand your product/service will have fewer issues with adaptation and have fewer service issues.

Increased Revenue

Of course, once you increase loyalty and have better operational efficiency you are going to increase revenue.

KYC/KYB Compliance

Customer onboarding makes Know Your Customer and Know Your Business (KYB) compliance easier. During the onboarding process, you learn all about your prospect and their businesses especially, if they are a Business to Business (B2B) client.

The customer onboarding process is similar to that of the customer or hero’s journey. During the onboarding process, your potential customer passes through something akin to a sales funnel. They go from the awareness stage where they become aware of your product/service then you get the prospect to the discovery stage where they may test the product. From there, it evaluation when the potential customers can decide to become paying customers. Now, once they purchase your product/service, your goal is to build customer loyalty and encourage repeat business.

During this customer onboarding process, there are a few things that banks, corporations and small businesses should be aware of to have KYC and AML compliance while obeying Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Laws.

1. Customer Identity Verification

Knowing your customer is the foundation to proper customer onboarding. There must be a way to electronically verify your customer’s id and email thereby, validating the information they have provided.

Customer identity verification and validation is the first and most necessary step in the onboarding process. Age verification and Know Your Customer (KYC) can be done with global id verification using a global identity verification service with anti-money laundering technology or with an id verification partner to screen for basic customer due diligence.

Verification, which is done using IDMkyc, is needed to first identify the source of the documentation and check data records to verify that they were in fact issued by the governmental body the potential customer says they are from. Validation, which is done using IDMscan, is done using biometric facial recognition to confirm that this is indeed the owner of said documents. Validation is crucial to KYC compliance and can work seamlessly with IDMaml as your automated AML solution to reduce the risk of fraud.

During verification and validation, companies with anti-money laundering technology, global id verification and email verification software can identify Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) and Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) that can put your Fintech company, bank, corporation or small business at risk of being non-compliant with the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). PEPs need special consideration and risk management by banks and businesses while SDNs can put you at risk for hefty fines.

To protect your business or non-profit, you should use IDMkyc and IDMscan as your global identity verification service and id validation service and IDMkyb when onboarding business to business (B2B) clients.

2. Incomplete Basic Customer Due Diligence

If you can’t confirm the customer’s identity and you can’t verify their email using email verification software then they’re probably not who they say they are. Other signs of fraud include refusal to provide supporting documentation or documents from unreliable sources, source of funds inconclusive and credentials fake.

To combat the activities of your would-be fraudster, global id verification using a global identity verification service that has automated AML solutions with AML fraud detection and automated KYC checks. This ensures your fraudster is identified and kept out of your system.

Behavior monitoring should be done during and after the onboarding process to both customers and users to identify suspicious activity and the possibility of an imposter scam i.e. identity theft. In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported consumers losing $3.3 billion dollars to fraud and almost 1.4 million reported cases of identity theft. These fraudsters used the stolen identities to get passports, government benefits and other government-issued documents.

For B2B companies, the best practice is to ensure that the company you are doing business with performs basic customer due diligence with global id verification and provides anti-money laundering solutions and services for their customers. They should also have full KYC and AML compliance and be compliant with the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). Or you can use IDMkyb to get all the relevant data on your corporate client, that way, you are fully aware of company ownership and to whom your company’s money goes.

3. Non-Compliance with AML Policies

Yes, you are in the business to make money, but you don’t want money earned from fraudulent means. And if you don’t pay attention to who you are onboarding, you could be receiving money from drugs, human trafficking or stolen goods.

Under the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, your company could be facing hefty fines if the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) or the Financial Intelligence Unit in your country discovers you are receiving money from suspicious sources.

To prevent being on the receiving end of those hefty fines or facing a shutdown, besides basic customer due diligence like address and global id verification, you’ll have to get an AML monitoring solution with anti-money laundering technology like AML fraud detection, AML monitoring screen software and use identity checks for money laundering. Working together with an experienced global identity verification service like IDMaml, to create an automated AML solution for faster AML fraud detection, verification and monitoring, you can be sure of your company’s KYC and AML compliance.

Since banks and Financial Technology companies are at a higher risk for money laundering activities, they usually face higher fines. So, there are usually more comprehensive AML solutions for banks and financial services. Banks and Fintech companies need to have their own additional in-house guidelines for KYC/KYB and money laundering.

4. Issues with Customer Onboarding Software

Even with strenuous testing and previous user onboarding, sometimes, problems show up mid-use that wasn’t planned for or even foreseen. This can affect your customer experience, onboarding process and even revenue.

Attempting to validate customer information without the proper id verification software, email verification software, AML screen monitoring software or using a trusted global identity verification service, AML monitoring solution or id validation service can cause problems when onboarding customers. Improper onboarding can lead to incorrect data, increases the risk of fraud and loss of revenue if your potential customer chooses to abandon the process.

No one wants to wait while you identify the problem and neither will they trust you with their data if your systems seem unstable. It also puts your product/service in a bad light as your potential customer can assume that it is faulty as well.

Opting to leave the onboarding process to the pros, is a better way of reducing the risk of your prospect abandoning the onboarding process and missing out on potential revenue. At IDMERIT, our cost-effective, GDPR compliant, global identity verification service has been tried and tested on Fortune 500 companies in over 100 countries for many years and we are committed to data protection and fighting fraud. Let us prove how we can give you the best and safest customer onboarding experience.

5. Opportunities to Make the Onboarding Process Easier

Besides having KYC and AML compliance and protecting your business and customers, other goals of customer onboarding are building trust and loyalty. At every stage of the onboarding process from sign-up to follow-up, you should be looking for opportunities to make the onboarding experience better.

Look out for ways to make it faster, safer and more user-friendly. You can ensure your onboarding process is mobile-friendly and can be done just as effectively on a smartphone as it is done on a computer. You can also have the onboarding process fully automated with automated KYC checks and automated AML solutions.

Constructive feedback and questions should be welcome at every stage of the onboarding process not just during walkthroughs, product setup or check-ins. Your potential customer should be able to interact with you from sign-up, during a data download and after purchase.

Seek ways to wow your potential sign-up by offering complementaries, freebies or swag packs as they go through the onboarding process to ensure they complete the process and encourage others to try your product/service. The incentive of early reward can result in free word-of-mouth advertising and a potential increase in revenue.

In your own company, we’re sure that there are many more opportunities you can find to reach out to your potential buyer and help them along the customer onboarding process. We at IDMERIT can be your automated AML solution assisting you with your customer onboarding process by providing AML fraud detection, anti-money laundering solution and service and id validation service to ensure you have to Know Your Customer compliance.

Closing

Paying attention to these five things during the customer onboarding process can make customer onboarding a seamless process for both the company and its clients.  Neither of you should have to worry about data protection, identity theft or fraud, having KYC and AML compliance or how long it takes. With IDMERIT’s skill in global identity verification services, they can verify, validate, reduce risk during the process and ensure B2B customers are also KYB compliant.

In the end, no matter how flawless your customer onboarding process is, you must provide value to your customers,  deliver on your customer service and continue to serve your customers long after they purchase. You can have a seamless onboarding process, but if you disappear when they have questions, you can end up with negative feedback and lose all the ground gained during the onboarding process.

However, IDMERIT can help you automate your entire customer onboarding process and monitor for any issues, protect your customer’s data and even make it mobile-friendly with automated KYC checks and automated AML solutions. IDMERIT’s trusted, cost-effective and comprehensive global identity verification service makes customer onboarding easier, faster and helps with KYC and AML compliance with global financial and security institutions. Let us prove we can do your customer onboarding process better. Talk to us today!

The post Five Things to Check for During the Customer Onboarding Process For KYC and AML Compliance appeared first on IDMERIT.

Enhance the Customer Journey through Digital Transformation

The first step to developing a digital-first customer journey is to determine what your customer journey is. Your airline must research its customer base thoroughly to develop accurate user personas. From there, you can create accurate depictions of how these different users approach your company and interact with it. This will allow you to gain knowledge about how your customers book flights with your airline or interact with post-flight surveys.

The goal is to discover key pain points for your customers. You can address several pain points at once by refining and updating your customer onboarding and profile creation process.

Customer Identity Verification for Passwordless Registration

We have come to understand that passwords are not a failsafe solution for keeping online accounts safe. For this reason, companies must develop different ways for users to access their online accounts. A lot can improve during the digital onboarding process, such as verifying identities with ease.

One way to do this is by using customer identity verification solutions during onboarding. With IDMscan, a customer identity verification solution, a consumer’s identity can be verified using a government-issued ID and then a biometric selfie comparison with the photo on the ID. After this process has been completed, a customer can log in to their account using a biometric selfie which is compared to stored selfie information gathered during the onboarding process. Biometric log-in would be much more secure than password methods.

This method of account sign-in is not only more secure but also more user-friendly as well. Passwordless login eases frustration among customers since they no longer must log-in using a password they’re likely to forget. Plus, as many as 70% of consumers state they support the expanded use of biometrics for security reasons online.

Gather Accurate Information, Especially on Mobile

Gathering information about your customer is critical for the success and longevity of your company. Data gives you a better understanding of your customer and allows you to create customized offerings for them depending on their preferences. Therefore, it’s so important that you gather information accurately and easily.

With tools like IDMautofill, you can extract personal information from a customer’s government issued ID during the onboarding process. This information will be transferred to onboarding form fields for customer ease and convenience. Filling out mobile forms can be especially cumbersome and difficult, so this technology is particularly useful in a mobile environment. IDMautofill can directly affect a customer’s attitude toward your company and service based on how easy it is for them to onboard in a mobile environment.

It is also important to ensure you gather customer information with their knowledge and consent. With the strict rules associated with GDPR, your airline must communicate what information you are gathering of your customer and why it is being gathered. You must also ensure you give your customers the opportunity to edit their imputed data and even opt out of sharing it if they wish. It is up to your company to demonstrate to your customers why it is in their benefit to share their personal information with your brand.

IDMERIT’s identity verification solutions offer robust ways to gather customer data that follow GDPR guidelines.

Securing the Airline Industry

As the world shifts and changes at a rapid rate, airlines must do everything they can to develop security processes that protect consumers. Nevertheless, they must balance their need for security with meeting customer expectations and needs. With the tools showcased above, airlines can not only make their industry more secure, but it can also increase satisfaction among consumers. Customer identity verification offers a way to change the way the airline industry operates online by quickly verifying identities in a secure way and simplifying the process for customers.

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Millennials present significant challenges to banks and financial services. They are against traditional banking and prefer banking on mobile platforms. Millennials are used to personalization, choice and instant gratification. Traditional banks globally are struggling to keep up in providing a more digital experience to these customers.

Financial institutions must work diligently to win the millennial customer through more effective mobile onboarding processes. Banks must understand that millennials are not interested in sitting through the lengthy, difficult and cumbersome mobile account opening processes. Thoughtfulness must be employed to create simple, easy and straightforward processes.

Adjust Onboarding Priorities to Millennials Needs

In order to create an efficient onboarding process for millennials, financial providers must understand their needs. Millennials grew up during a time of rapid technological advancement. Because of this, they were quick to adopt changes in technology, such as the smartphone. Mobile cell phone usage has increased dramatically because of how rapidly millennials embraced smartphone technology. Smartphones allowed millennials to access the internet on the go and at any time.

Millennials were also the first generation to have immediate and rapid access to technology. Through their smartphones, millennials could gather and absorb information via Google and social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. They grew up in an age where the world shifted information into digital formats.

Because of this incredible amount of access, millennials expect a lot out of the services they use. They have no patience for companies that cannot serve their needs in a quick and efficient manner. This is especially true for financial services. If banks do not take these considerations into account during the onboarding process, millennials will quickly abandon them for other financial service providers that do address their needs.

Speed up Onboarding Times with Digital Onboarding Providers

One of the major complaints about digital financial service onboarding is that it takes such a long time. In many cases, millennials abandon mobile banking because the process takes too long. One of the key reasons for this is the complicated KYC and AML process. Many banks do not use automated identity verification tools to verify their customers, which makes the user verification process lengthy and cumbersome. Switching to an online identity verification solution and digital onboarding provider can make the verification process fast and painless for millennials. This is an obvious solution to customer abandonment which will lead to more satisfied customers.

Create Stunning User Experiences

Financial institutions must consider all the different ways that millennials may choose to become a customer. If this is through mobile, solutions are available that extract data from identity documents during onboarding and prepopulate forms. This reduces the amount of information a user must manually type into a mobile form, simplifying the form filling process and saving them time.

Thought must be put into each part of the customer journey. Not only must the user journey look amazing, but it should also feel easy and effortless for the customer to complete. Give users clear, simple instructions about each stage of the onboarding process. Also, explain to them why you are gathering their information. This will help users understand why you are asking for certain information—such as their ID during KYC identity checks—and create more user trust and retention.

Provide Omnichannel Support to Users

Millennials live in a world where they are looking at their phones for information, switch to a computer screen for something else and then go to a tablet to do something else. They have a variety of different technologies available at their disposal to perform daily tasks. This means that banks must work diligently to provide their services on a wide variety of different platforms including:

• Telephone
• Mobile
• Tablet
• Smartwatches
• Desktop

Financial services open themselves up to more customers by creating financial service platforms that work in all these different environments. They must also ensure that they are able to use the technologies embedded on each platform to perform instant identity verification to support fast onboarding times.

The Future of Financial Service Onboarding

Millennials will impact all aspects of American social, political and economic life. They will be the catalysts to redefine how companies, especially banks, do business for the foreseeable future. Financial institutions that work diligently to cater find digital onboarding providers that meet millennial needs. This will set them up to reap the rewards this large population will present in the future.

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For banks and financial institutions, the account creation process is even more important. Financial institutions must follow Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations during customer sign up. This must be done to prevent financial crime and terrorist financing.

Steps must be taken to simplify this process though. Meeting regulation requirements should be equally as important as creating a frictionless experience for customers. This is extremely important because complicated onboarding processes can cause customer abandonment. This affects revenue and affects brand perception. A well thought out account creation process is critical for banks and financial institutions. In this article, we will share tips on ways to streamline the process while also maintaining regulatory compliance.

Set Clear Expectations for the Sign-Up Process

It is easier to start a journey when you know exactly what it takes to complete the process. Showing potential customers what your financial institution needs to onboard them is a simple and effective way to motivate them to complete the process. Make each small and simple to complete for the user. This will prevent them from getting overwhelmed with the sign-up process. Creating a clear line of communication from the start of your relationship can be the difference from creating brand loyalty or brand distrust.

Create Omnichannel Account Opening Processes

Today, consumers use a variety of devices throughout the day. They can switch from using a smartphone, tablet, browser or call center in real time. Because the use of multiple devices is so common, consumers expect businesses to seamlessly integrate their services to a variety of different platforms.

This is a huge problem for financial institutions. Only 23% of banks state that they have omnichannel account opening processes in place. Another 40% of banks state that they do not have KYC compliance solutions embedded within their digital applications. This means a huge percentage of financial institutions have no capacity to allow their customers to apply for products digitally. As we continue to move to a more digital world, it is critical that traditional banks adapt and create these online application channels for their potential customers. Otherwise, customers are likely to use financial services that support that make onboarding easy for them.

Use Biometric Technology during Customer Onboarding

Incorporating biometric technology during customer account creation is both simple and effective. It takes information about a user—a fingerprint, an iris scan, a facial scan, behavioral monitoring, etc.—and uses it to identify a person. This helps financial institutions know who they are doing business with prior to entering a relationship with them and stay compliant with KYC standards. This process is relatively easy, straightforward and faster than other forms of identity verification. Plus, 67% of customers already trust biometrics for identification purposes.

Perform Instant Identity Verification

For financial institutions, robust identification procedures must be put in place as a part of an effective KYC compliance solution. This helps them meet KYC and AML compliance standards. Nevertheless, the processes must be quick for customers to complete. Otherwise, they may take their business elsewhere.

Over 45% of banks report that it takes around two weeks to onboard new customers. Plus, another 44% state they do not know how long account sign up takes. This is a huge shortcoming for banks. Technology now exists that offers instant identity verification for banks. The technologies are automated, secure and global.

These technologies should be incorporated into the account sign up process to ensure that it is quick and easy. Identity verification tools can be used in both digital and non-digital environments. This will help banks stay relevant at a time where traditional financial institutions are facing competition from new fintech start-ups.

Introduce Device Detection Technology

Another way to meet KYC and AML standards is with device detection technology. This technology scans the device software being used by a customer to determine their risk for committing fraud. Device detection technology is a way to identify potential criminals without the use of personal information. It analyzes particular device characteristics to evaluate if a device pattern suggests fraud. This technology usually runs in the background and does not affect the customer experience. This is a high-value solution at a low cost for customer-not-present scenarios.

Conclusion

Customer onboarding can be a tricky process to master, especially for financial institutions. Measures must be taken to simplify the process while also maintaining its integrity. KYC and AML regulations must be complied with while also making it easy for the potential customer to complete. Financial institutions can effectively create digital sign-up processes by incorporating new technologies into the process, making it easy to verify users in a customer not present environment.

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