Christina Luttrell, Chief Executive Officer at GBG Americas
A recent report showed that 86% of businesses view identity verification as a strategic differentiator, allowing them to capitalize on digital adoption while delivering a seamless customer experience. Consumers who don’t trust the digital identity verification process are more likely to use guest checkout (54%) and less likely to keep a payment card on file (43%), thereby creating a drag on profits while compromising the end-user experience.
The following best practices can help fintechs locate, verify and approve new customers without friction or fraud while streamlining the customer journey.
- Onboarding in The Digital Landscape
Being successful in a digital environment means being able to onboard and verify users in a purely digital way. This means doing all the required elements, such as KYC, AML, checking against sanctions lists, etc., in a digital-only environment, which can be challenging.
This means needing to design a UX that is inclusive of digital identity verification at its core, with access to multiple verification layers that can be deployed in each required scenario. Fintechs make money by people utilizing their service. Providing a digital experience that opens the door to more good customers—while also meeting regulatory requirements—is a goal for all fintech providers.
A robust ID verification solution gives fintechs the confidence to onboard more legitimate customers faster, with nominal friction, while staying compliant.
- Data Diversity & Consortium Networks
Central to the requirement for effective digital identity verification is data diversity. Incorporating other identity verification data sources is essential, as the more indicators are used, the more robust the system is compared to a traditional system reliant on credit checks, which can be breached.
The other consideration is data transparency – data must be sourced and explained, as a critical requirement for ongoing regulatory compliance, and justify decisions to customers.
This is where the idea of consortium networks, where data is shared between a large network of interconnected parties, becomes highly important, as they enable new account openings at different institutions to benefit from fraud data and learnings elsewhere in the ecosystem, securing the whole market more effectively.
- Ongoing Verification
Onboarding is an important element of fraud prevention, but ongoing verification is necessary, which is the authentication part of the equation. Opening a fraudulent account is a risk, but account takeover of an existing account is also a significant risk, as payment account fraudsters have access to make payments and view transaction history and payment details.
The requirement is for fintechs to design strategies that ensure that verification is carried out continuously. This could be when an unusual transaction is made, or when a new payment method is set up, or in any number of given scenarios.
Given what’s at stake, if fintechs fail to implement robust systems based on more than just point solutions for ID document scanning, they will struggle to deal with evolving fraudster tactics. For this reason, the industry could see the continued fusing of physical and digital attributes for verification, such as taking name, address, date of birth, etc. Only by taking a multi-layered, customizable approach will banks achieve the best anti-fraud and customer experience outcomes.
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