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COVID-19: Technology, Information & Information Technology

Posted on | by Signzian

For those of us away from the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, behavior change began from chemist runs to buy sanitizer. About 3 months in, with precautions and anxieties rising, we’re compulsively refreshing coronavirus dashboards, social distancing, and packing our pantries.

With a rising death toll, analogies to dystopian apocalyptic times are surfacing. But, so are stories of our heroic front-line workers, global solidarity, quarantine creativity, and technological innovation. The first part of this blog is to understand technology as the boon, bane, and balm of these times. The second part is to delve deeper into the role of social media in this “infodemic”, and the third is to briefly assess the IT sector’s response to the crisis.

Technology: Boon/Bane/Balm?

Computer modeling of the coronavirus’s spread based on airplane flights and travel data is helping epidemiologists (someone who studies the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases) predict where the illness will move next and how. Professionals performing infectious disease modeling across the globe are trying to ascertain how the disease will unfold so that governments may take apt precautionary measures and maintain accurate numbers. A model is however, as good as the data fed into it. Even with uncertain numbers, modelers are trying to work on critical issues like how many people are infected but symptom-less, increasing undetected numbers.

Other technological measures deployed in the time of corona are assessed country wise:

China

China is fighting against this public health crisis with its tech giants at the fore. There is news of new hospitals in Wuhan only staffed with robots. While many of these tech implementations are setting new healthcare practices, experts are deeming some as performative gimmicks and excuses for future mass surveillance by the authoritarian, press-controlling Chinese government.

1. Color Coded QR

Near the epicenter of the outbreak, entering public transport, one’s apartment or office, requires scanning a QR code which color codes the risk factor a citizen poses as red, yellow or green. This can be accompanied by writing down one’s name, ID number, temperature and recent travel history. This quarantine determination project is called the Alipay Health Code. It is an app developed for the local government of Hangzhou with the help of Alibaba’s sister company Ant Financial. It’s set to have nationwide implementation.

Neither Chinese officials nor Alipay have explained in detail how people are classified by the system. It is speculated that the compulsory app uses Big Data to identify potential carriers of the virus. The data can include stats sourced from transport agencies, health centers, and state-owned firms.

2. Drones, Robots and Autonomous Vehicles

In cities under lockdown, drones are being used to transport medical supplies and patient samples. They can also be used to spray disinfectant across large areas. According to authorities the aerial tech is also an effective way to scan large crowds to spot if someone needs medical attention and warn those not wearing masks of repercussions.

Robots are doubling up as cooks, cleaners, and delivery to eliminate human contact as much as possible. An important function for robots at the front-lines is thermal imaging and basic diagnostic functions.

China has nurtured various self-driving, autonomous vehicle platforms such as Baidu’s Apollo. They are proving to be an effective system to cut out human contact and ensure efficient delivery of essential supplies.

3. Big Data, Facial Recognition and AI

Taking a closer look, the color code app and surveillance drones use Big Data and streamlined facial recognition technology at their core. China has a history of using such data and AI to keep tabs on its citizens. In this time of crises, the role has simply been streamlined to enforce quarantines.

As an after-effect of the attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19, another ailment is spreading in China; mass surveillance. The country could easily use the health crisis as a justification to expand its already vast surveillance system.

With the race to find a vaccine for the coronavirus underway, tech giants like Alibaba and DIDI are contributing their computing power to help hospitals perform diagnoses and possibly find a cure.

USA

The U.S. government and public health experts are considering taking the help of private companies to aggregate anonymous smartphone location data to combat the virus. Talks are underway with Google and Facebook to track the infection. It could be a powerful tool to pinpoint the next hotspot or allocate health resources.

South Korea

When COVID-19 reached South Korea, anxiety was coupled with a bout of coding. Multiple apps have come into existence which help track the spread by sourcing data from publicly available government information. A person using the “Corona 100m” app can determine their proximity to the coronavirus patient. The government is also distributing smartphone alerts about the movements of people who have tested positive.

Singapore

Singapore has adopted a different method to tackle the pandemic. Thousands of people have imposed self-quarantine since the initial days of the outbreak. People required to isolate themselves are called multiple times a day and asked to click an online link to share their phone’s location. With officials successfully tracking infected individuals, this method proved to be effective. The Singapore police force is using CCTV footage to trace contacts and draw up lists of people who could be possibly exposed through interviews.

Iran

Iran’s official COVID-19 detection app “AC19” was removed by Google from the Play Store. Several users had accused the Iranian government of using the coronavirus as a means to scare citizens and tricking them into installing the app which was then used to collect phone numbers and real-time geo-location data. The most probable reason the app was taken off the Play Store was its misleading claims. It asserted that it could determine whether an individual had contracted COVID-19 or not. The app could not perform a diagnosis in any sense.

Israel

Israel is set to use its ‘anti-terror’ technology to counter the virus. Cyber monitoring would be deployed to track individuals who tested positive in real-time through their mobile phones to catch breaches in quarantine.

Social Media in a Time of Social Distancing

During a pandemic, there are two things we have to be vary of; the disease itself and the misinformation it creates. When every 2nd notification is an update or speculation about the virus, it becomes difficult to step away, and yet be aware. The sheer mass of posts has a tendency to fuel fear and racism, yet also hope.

On the one hand there is the problem of rumors and fake news, but on the other there is a paucity of information and the issue of censorship by authoritarian governments. Both construct dangerous false narratives. Stringent responses are being taken for each situation, but for very different intents:

  • To curb misinformation
  • To control what information goes out in the world

The World Health Organization (WHO) in a situation report dated 2nd February 2020, coined the mass of information as an infodemic.

“The 2019-nCoV outbreak and response has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ — an overabundance of information — some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.”

To curb this peril, Google has scrubbed its searches in an attempt to remove misinformation. A simple Google search now triggers an SOS Alert with links from reputed news organizations. It also brings up a “Help and Information” section with resources from local governments and the WHO. Google also blocked thousands of ads capitalizing on the virus. Similarly, Facebook banned listings of medical face masks on its marketplace due to the exorbitant prices they were being sold at. YouTube also removed a host of hoax videos and cure claims from their site. Ads have been removed from videos by verified accounts that are meant to inform and educate citizens.

On Chinese social media, information on COVID-19 is being tightly controlled. Censorship of coronavirus related content started from early stages of the outbreak and continued to expand. It blocked a wide range of speech depending on the platform. From personal accounts, warnings, criticism of the government and even officially sanctioned facts and information.

  • YY, a live-streaming platform in China blocked keywords related to the outbreak.
  • WeChat, broadly censored coronavirus-related content which could be critical or neutral. This included references to the late Dr. Li Wenliang who gave the first warning of the outbreak. Any comments on the Chinese government’s efforts on handling the outbreak, even facts, were censored.

However, with the barrage of information shared by Chinese social media users, the government was pressured to put out more accurate numbers and official warnings. Some of the personal accounts by doctors and medical professionals that did get through the censors, gave journalists worldwide an idea of ground realities to monitor its progression.

Tech Disruptors adapting to a Disrupted Life

Established models are being evaluated. Empty shelves in stores implies that the supply chain is being tested. Situation-based preference shopping is observed. Panic influenced buying patterns point to extreme mathematical models which AI and the IT sector are trying to solve. With millions of people working from home, the strength of online platforms is being tested, productivity channels are being rewritten, and techniques reworked. Some tech companies are playing their role in easing us into this interim lifestyle:

  • Microsoft rolled out updates on Teams to make it available to companies for free for six months in an effort to help remote productivity during the outbreak. It is also licensing Office 365 E1 free for six months.
  • Zoho Corporation allowing its WFH tool ‘Remotely’ to be used for free till July
  • Cisco ‘s remote working tool ‘Webex’ can now be used for 90 days under its free license
  • Google is set to roll out Advanced Hangouts Meet Conferencing to all G Suite customers for free
  • Edtech platform BYJU’S is letting students from grades 1–12 download and access the programs on their Learning App free of cost till the end of April.
  • Online tutoring platform, Vedantu, has made its learning platform free for all students, teachers, and schools.

Here’s hoping dystopia remains just a popular Netflix genre and we emerge from this crisis with a lifetime of lessons. Don’t forget to wash your hands.

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Signzy

Written by an insightful Signzian intent on learning and sharing knowledge.

 

Impact of RBI’s NSFI report on Different Indian Business Sectors

Posted on | by Signzian

Need For Financial Inclusion

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has intricately planned out an ambitious strategy for financial inclusion till 2024. The National Strategy for Financial Inclusion report aims to fortify the ecosystem for various modes of digital financial services in order to create the necessary infrastructure to move towards a less-cash society by March 2022. While charting out the report for the period 2019–2024, RBI said, “Financial inclusion is increasingly being recognized as a key driver of economic growth and poverty alleviation the world over.”

Similar to the conventional banks, other institutions like payments banks, small finance banks, co-operative banks and other entities such as fertilizer shops, fair price shops, should encourage the use of digital transactions to uphold efficiency and transparency. The NSFI report outlines the need for increasing the reach of banking outlets of scheduled commercial banks, payment banks, etc to provide banking access to every village within a 5 km radius and at least 500 households in hilly areas by March 2020.

The increased global recognition and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) empower financial inclusion as a pivot for achieving sustainable development across the globe, countries are developing strategic policies to increase access and usage of formal financial services.

One of the key objectives of the World Bank is to achieve Universal Financial Access by 2020 (UFA 2020). The intent behind this is to provide adults who currently aren’t part of the formal financial system, with access to a transaction account to store money, send and receive payments to manage their financial lives. (Universal Financial Access 2020, 2018)

To achieve this ambitious goal, the World Bank Group has committed to enable one billion people to gain access to a transaction account through targeted interventions.It also works with countries to fortify the following primary building blocks:

  • public and private sector commitment
  • initiation of legal and regulatory framework
  • strengthening financial infrastructure
  • interaction with regulatory bodies on a global scale to provide guidelines that will enable access to transaction accounts.

Objectives of Financial Inclusion:

  • To provide awareness and enlighten customers on financial services, procuring various types of products and their highlights.
  • An objective has been defined where every eligible & consenting adult enrolled under the Prime Minister Jan Dhan Yojana, will be provided with an insurance scheme and a pension scheme by March 2020.
  • Change attitudes to translate knowledge into behavior.
  • Help consumers get a clear understanding of their rights and responsibilities as consumers of financial services.
  • Enhance the reach of banking outlets to provide banking access to every village within a 5-km radius or a hamlet of 500 households in hilly areas by March 2020.
  • By March 2024, every adult should have access to a financial service provider through a mobile device.

Application of Financial Inclusion Across Various Business Sectors

The RBI has drafted the NSFI 2019–24 under the supervision of the Financial Inclusion Advisory Committee (FIAC). The report has been created on the basis of inputs and suggestions from the Government of India as well as other Financial Sector Regulators. The report has also been approved by the Financial Stability Development Council (FSDC).

The NSFI 2019–24 outlines the vision and primary objectives for financial inclusion policies in India to help expand and sustain the process on a national scale. This can be done through a broad convergence of action which includes all the major constituents of the financial sector. As such, certain focus areas have been identified across various business sectors which we will discuss below.

Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs):

  • MSMEs are the primary catalysts that drive the growth of the Indian economy. They contribute nearly 31% to India’s GDP, 45% to exports and provide employment opportunities to more than 11.1 crore skilled and semi-skilled people.
  • An estimated presence of 6.33 crore MSMEs can be located in the country. Several initiatives have been undertaken to enable credit off take in this industrial sector.
  • A special capacity building programme named ‘National Mission for Capacity Building of Bankers for financing MSME Sector’ (NAMCABS) has been devised to familiarise bankers with the entire gamut of credit related issues of the MSME sector.
  • Web portals like the ‘Udyami Mitra’ and ‘psb loan in 59minutes’ have also been launched to provide easy access to credit. Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) platforms have been set up to address the problem of delayed payments to MSMEs. In April 2015, the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), an initiative to finance small business enterprises, was introduced. This was to ensure lending institutions would finance micro entrepreneurs up to ₹10 lakh. The interest subvention initiative has been launched for MSMEs to alleviate the cost of borrowings..

Agriculture:

  • In India, agriculture serves as the source of around 15 percent of GDP, 11 percent of exports and livelihood for about half of the Indian population. The importance of the sector from a macroeconomic perspective is also reflected in the form of bank credit to finance agricultural and allied activities relative to other sectors of the economy.
  • Banks have been mandated specific targets under priority sector schemes to give a thrust to agriculture financing from the formal sector, Currently the target for agriculture lending under priority sector for all domestic scheduled commercial banks and foreign banks having more than 20 branches is 18% of Adjusted Net Bank Credit (ANBC) or Credit Equivalent Amount of Off-Balance Sheet Exposure (CEAOBE), whichever is higher.
  • Within the 18 per cent target for agriculture, a sub-target of 8 percent of ANBC or Credit Equivalent Amount of Off-Balance Sheet Exposure, whichever is higher is prescribed for Small and Marginal Farmers. The banks have been advised to extend collateral free loans to small and marginal farmers upto ₹1.6 lakh. To provide adequate and timely credit support from the banking system under a single window to the farmers for their cultivation & other needs, an innovative product called the Kisan Credit Card Scheme (KCC) was launched in August 1998 as a flexible source of cash credit for easy access and delivery.

Banking:

  • RBI has adopted a bank oriented system to strengthen financial inclusion. The banks were mandated to open branches nationwide especially in under-banked pockets which led to a considerable increase in bank branches and later Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) in the 1990s to early 2000.
  • The banks were instructed to draw up a road map for having banking outlets in villages with population more than 2000 (in 2009) and less than 2000 (in 2012). Consequently, the banks were advised to open brick and mortar branches in villages with populations of more than 5000. The banks were also advised to prepare Financial Inclusion Plans for a period of three years comprising key parameters viz., modes of delivery of financial services, access to Basic Savings Bank Deposit Accounts (BSBDAs) as well as transactions via the BC Channel.
  • To fortify financial inclusion, RBI has relaxed the branch authorization guidelines in 2017 wherein fixed-point Business Correspondent(BC) outlets serving for more than 4 hours a day and five days a week are treated in a similar fashion to branches with physical infrastructure. An exclusive fund viz., Financial Inclusion Fund (FIF) has been created to support adoption of technology and capacity building with an initial corpus of ₹2000 crore.
  • As a measure to improve financial inclusion, RBI has issued differentiated banking license viz., Small Finance Banks (SFBs) and Payments Banks in 2015. The objective of setting up of SFBs was to further financial inclusion by provision of a savings vehicle and supply of credit to small business units, small and marginal farmers, micro and small industries as well as other unorganized sector constituents. This can be done with high technology-low cost operations. Payments Banks have been set up to provide small savings accounts and payments/remittance services to migrant labor workforce, low income households, small businesses and other unorganized sector entities / other users.
  • In order to strengthen the business correspondents(BC) model of delivery and help prospective users to identify BCs having good service track record, the BC Registry has been launched under the aegis of Indian Banks’ Association (IBA). For capacity building and to ensure certain minimum standards of service rendered by the BCs, a BC Certification course through Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (IIBF) has also been introduced.

Insurance:

  • The key initiatives undertaken in the insurance sector include increasing awareness among citizens on the benefits and appropriateness of insurance and enabling greater availability of insurance products (including micro-insurance). This can be done by increasing the number of delivery channels which consist of corporate agents as well as Common Service Centers.
  • Further, with the use of technology, Web Aggregators and Insurance Repositories have been erected to provide ease of access and storage of insurance policy details to enable issuance of insurance policies in an electronic form.
  • Towards the interests of policyholders and also in building their confidence in the system, the institution of Insurance Ombudsman has been created. The objective is to quickly dispose of grievances of the insured customers and also mitigate their problems involved in redressal of their grievances. To protect the interests of policyholders and customers catered to by the insurance companies / intermediaries under the Health insurance segment, separate guidelines have been issued.

Pension:

To monitor and control the National Pension System (NPS) and other pension schemes which are not subject to any other enactment, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) was set up under the PFRDA Act, 2013. Some of the key initiatives undertaken in the pension sector include expansion of NPS via increased channels of distribution, developing efficiency of the officials of its intermediaries and increasing the awareness on old age income security and retirement planning. The regulatory authority has also leveraged technology in an effort to drive efficiencies & improve ease of access to NPS for the subscribers and service providers.

Future Scope of Fintechs in NSFI

The policies on financial inclusion would be incomplete if digital financial inclusion and the role of fintechs is not meaningfully integrated. While the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar — Mobile trinity has been a benefactor to Indian economy over the last few years, adequate measures are needed to strengthen the ecosystem for digital financial services, including increased awareness on usage of digital modes of transactions, increased access points/ acceptance infrastructure and a safe environment incorporating the principles of consent and privacy.

Based on the report, it is expected that over the next few years, the fintech space may evolve from its present structure, calling for adequate understanding among regulators, financial service providers and most importantly the customers availing financial services through the digital mode. It is important to primarily address the newly-included digital customers through sufficient awareness and literacy.

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Signzy

Written by an insightful Signzian intent on learning and sharing knowledge.

 

Is your online identity on the line?

Posted on | by Signzian

Among the questions that can potentially induce an existential crisis is, “Who are you?”. Among the phrases that can answer this question are, “You are who you are”, “You are what you do”, “You are what you eat”, and the optimistic “You are what you want to be”. This blog isn’t a metaphysical exploration of who we all are. But, as residents of the Internet Age, it is an attempt to figure out what constitutes our online identities, how they’re threatened, verified, and protected.

The sum of an individual’s characteristics and interactions on the internet can be said to be their online identity. Every minuscule piece of information about a person on the internet adds to this virtual identity. Since our interaction with different online sites would be different, each site has its own understanding of who a person is.

Amazon knows what products you like to buy. Zomato knows all about your midnight cravings. Google has seen the panicky medical searches made at the slightest hint of a cough. Uber probably knows where you live. Facebook knows your friends just as much as it knows you. Netflix knows what you binge after work, and Spotify knows your workout jam.

This may not give a clear picture of the individual to these platforms, but defines a way to identify them. All of these are an individual’s partial identities, the aggregate of which make up who we are online.

Our online identities are related to a number of facets in the virtual world. The prominent ones are discussed ahead:

Profiles, Cookies, and Footprints

Site Profiles:
For many of the apps and sites we sign up on, we construct profiles. When it is not required to feed some data for the creation of a profile, unbeknownst to us, the site creates a profile for us. This is to distinguish an individual, maintain a record for them, and secure their information. An attribute called an “identifier” is needed to create this automatic profile. The identifier is a way of referring to a set of characteristics. It can be something like a number given by the site, your email ID or a username.

Browser Cookies:
A cookie can be understood as a piece of information sent by a web server for the browser to store. The browser returns the cookie to the server the next time the page is opened. Cookies usually contain at least two pieces of data:

• a unique user identifier
• some information about that user

It’s cookies that preserve the state of a user’s interaction on a site across browser sessions and page reloads. They help in the optimum functioning of the website, and although seemingly innocuous and invisible, cookies can store various data points. If you allow your browser to accept cookies, you are being tracked. For example, sites using embedded Google tools such as the search bar, trace your activity via cookies whose data Google will have access to.

Cookies fall under the purview of data protection regulations such as the GDPR, which is a testament to the personal nature of the data they contain. Explicit consent is now required from the user to allow the cookies to attach themselves to an individual’s browser.

Digital Footprints:
We are constantly leaving behind a digital footprint on the internet. This refers to the traces of data we leave behind on the internet, the primary constituents of which are website cookies and social media activity. This footprint is what is commonly commercialized. Third parties such as advertisers pay for this data, and digital footprints are thus monetized with companies having access to our data. This may lead to:

  • Data deduced from footprints used for big data analytics
  • Loss of privacy and anonymity
  • Information shared with advertisers without our explicit knowledge for targeted advertising
  • Malicious activity such as identity theft

Identity Providers

In the technical sense, identity provision can be distilled into three forms:

a) Traditional or retrospective identities: Individuals receive a credential from a third party after a trusted enrollment process. It can then be used to authenticate oneself.

b) Low trust or self-asserted identities: The third party merely issues an identifier to the individual which it can confirm when asked.

c) Behavioral identities: When enough data about an individual is collected by the service providers to decipher that the same person is visiting multiple times.

Google or Facebook have the capacity to act as a trusted identity provider (IdP) by authenticating an individual on behalf of some other online entity that is being signed in to. These are called social IdPs and are accepted across platforms for their convenience, bypassing re-authentication processes. With this possibility, the digital world is shifting from siloed credentials to those that are accepted across platforms. For example, your employee ID cannot be used to identify you at an airport, but your Google account can be used to make a booking through MakeMyTrip.

While this type of identity aggregation makes the onboarding process efficient for individuals, it is also beneficial for advertisers. As opposed to using subsets of data from different platforms, referring to an IdP allows them to:

  • Personalize experience
  • Provide recommendations
  • Preserve customer histories
  • Prepare and proliferate hyper targeted ads

However, this gives rise to the problem of panopticism. It is a concept by French philosopher Michel Foucault used to explain a kind of internal surveillance. In this case, the IdP will be able to keep track of each place an individual is authenticating, without them being overtly aware of the data being subliminally collected.

It is evident that social logins are shaping the future of our digital identities. The European Commission has even proposed the idea of using national ID cards to access online services, such as Facebook, Uber and Twitter. A Facebook profile could thus be lobbied as a border-less digital identity. On the flip side, KYC for social media users has been proposed in India as a way to combat trolling online.

The proliferation of aggregated identities reveals the difficulty and need to remain anonymous in the 21st century. This has paved the way for the existence of alternatives like:

  • Sign in with Apple, which can authenticate a user using Face ID on their iPhone without turning over any of their personal data to a third-party company.
  • Anonymous social apps such as Whisper which functions as any other social media site, except for they are supposed to be completely anonymous. Users are issued a random nickname upon joining which cannot be searched.

Threats to Online Identity

With our use of the internet entwined with our online identity, the aim isn’t to be anonymous anymore, but to control the degree to which subsets of our data are revealed to public and private entities. While it is difficult to be in full control, it is important to be familiar with the existing threats to our online identity.

Data breaches

A data breach is when confidential information is accessed by an entity not having the authorization to do so. It is common for breaches to go undetected, or companies to not reveal to customers that there has been a breach. “HaveIBeenPwned” is a website that lets netizens check if their personal data has been leaked in data breaches. It reveals the company, year, and constituents of the data breaches where one’s data was compromised from an online account. You can then take remedial measures to safeguard your data and be vary of unsafe logins.

Hackers

Hackers use a multitude of ways to reel in victims of identity theft. Two of the most common ones are phishing and keylogging.

  1. Phishing is the process of deceiving an individual into sharing sensitive information. It involves attaching links or malicious software codes/bits to a non-suspicious medium like e-mail or a Facebook attachment (pictures/audio clips etc). Clicking on the link/attachment will redirect you to an imitation of a trusted website where you would need to provide your credentials. For example, when being phished a careful observation of the URL space in your browser will show that you are not truly on facebook.com, but instead a sly imitation like fac3book.com. An individual’s login credentials, passwords, bank details etc, can then be sold on the blackmarket, used to steal identities or commit bank fraud.
  2. Keylogging is the retrieval of information through the act of covertly recording keystrokes of a device user. An attacker can use keylogging to intercept sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers. A preventive measure is using a virtual keyboard when logging in or carrying out transactions online.

ISP Tracking

Internet Service Providers store the logs of IP addresses and session timings for billing and legal purposes. However, it can be used for questionable purposes as well:

  • Data retention, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency requested information from ISPs in the US for surveillance purposes
  • Data monetization, selling of personal data (this is legal in some countries)
  • Bandwidth throttling, in areas where net neutrality is threatened
  • Monitoring, for torrents and illegal file shares, copyright infringements

Surveillance

While citizens have a right to privacy in India, constitutional provisions are not yet in effect to question government surveillance of personal data. Excesses of government surveillance, and exceptions in personal data protection laws can lead to aspects of one’s online identity being used against them. It is imperative to hold our governments accountable to privacy demands. The epitome of surveillance is China’s social credit system which tracks individual, corporate, and government behavior across the country in real time to build a database on its citizens.

Verifying Online Identity

While the privacy of our identity is a concern, on the flip side banks and fintechs are concerned with verifying this identity. With a multitude of transactions happening online, verification of our digital identities is imperative.

A digital identity comprises of two forms of information:

  1. Digital attributes: Email address, date of birth, government issued ID, biometrics, login credentials etc.
  2. Digital activities: Likes and comments of social sites, purchase history, photos on Instagram etc.

For the most part, the verification of an identity is done by authenticating digital attributes.

The classic method to gain an acceptable level of assurance that the identity of an online customer matches their real-world identity is a three part paradigm which includes verifying:

  1. Something the individual knows (eg. password/ security question)
  2. Something the customer has (eg. identity card)
  3. Something the customer is (eg. biometrics, such as a fingerprint)

Banks may require more information for security reasons. One way is to observe and an individual’s behavioral data such as login habits. When there is an anomaly, the bank can then alert the customer and verify activity to prevent fraud.Digital identity verification service can encompass social media identity as a layer of verification. For example, BlaBlaCar and Ola request sharing of social media profiles as an additional layer for a quicker KYC process.

More than seventy financial institutions including 7 major banks in India trust Signzy’s RealKYC and VideoKYC solutions to make the entire process simple, secure, and compliant.

Protecting Online Identity

While it seems as if the virtual walls of the internet have eyes and ears, it is not difficult to protect your data. Although it appears as if the government and private companies alike are after your personal data and online identity, with data protection regulations in effect, no one can access your data without your knowledge and in some places, your consent. (To read more on the regulations in place in the EU and India, you can take a look at our article comparing the GDPR and PDP Bill)

Here are a few ideas on how to safeguard your private information:

  • Inspect privacy policies before granting permissions
  • Change passwords often
  • Avoid unprotected or public Wi-Fi networks
  • Have a primary and secondary email. When logging in to a new site you do not trust, use a secondary email which is not linked to any other accounts with personal information
  • Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access the internet. This masks your IP and ensures your trail is encrypted, dissuading any malware to follow into your device.
  • Try not to save passwords on your browser. This can protect you from malicious cookies that may get access to the rest of your saved passwords.

Whether you know who exactly you are or not, you’re now adept to protect who you are in the digital world.

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Signzy

Written by an insightful Signzian intent on learning and sharing knowledge.

 

Data privacy: the debacle & the debate (GDPR vs PDP)

Posted on | by Signzian

In an increasingly data driven digital economy, Big Tech companies have an eye, ear, and finger on the pulse of billions.

Depending on how deep you’ve let Amazon, Facebook, and Google sync into your life (pun intended), the data these companies have access to has reached an increasing level of detail. The digital era has molded us into great liars when it comes to signing up to online sites. While complaining about how ridiculous it seems to identify traffic lights to prove we’re not robots, we mechanically lie about reading all the Terms and Conditions. By agreeing to the T&C we may have inadvertently let the company use and sell our data for reasons we weren’t aware of.

Contextualizing the need for personal data protection

In the past few years, the headlines have been replete with worrying instances from the digital world. From large scale data breaches to controversial targeted political ad policies and inconclusive investigative hearings on privacy. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal of 2018 exposed how unethically sourced personal data could be used for thought manipulation. Data of about 87 million Facebook users was inappropriately harvested by the political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, and was used for electoral advertising.

The mammoth scale and global repercussions of this scandal altered the history of the privacy debate. It revealed the imperative need to have wide-scale legal mechanisms. A system needed to be enforced to regulate what data will be collected, what it will be used for, and how permission should be sought from its owners. Organizations would have to be held accountable to such provisions through a transparent legal process. These regulations were to be designed to protect the privacy and personal data of netizens and perhaps rein in the power and influence of giant tech companies.

Introducing EU’s GDPR and India’s PDP

The European Union set precedence with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR was adopted in 2016 and enforced on 25 May 2018. It is not a mere directive, but a regulation. This implies that it is directly binding and applicable although it does allow for some flexibility to individual member nations to adjust the provisions. The GDPR is also not an Act, which means that its members have passed their own legislations based on the regulation.

In India, a regulation governing data privacy and data protection is set to be passed this year. The need stemmed from the 2017 Supreme Court judgement on the Right to Privacy. (Read our article on how the judgment impacted the digital world and the financial sector here.) A draft data protection bill was then composed by a committee headed by Justice B. N. Srikrishna. After about 2 years of contentious debate on the bill, during which it was floated for public feedback from stakeholders, it was tabled in the Indian Parliament on 11 December 2019. Currently, a joint parliamentary committee is scrutinizing the revised draft of the bill, codified as the Personal Data Protection Bill (PDP Bill). Post this, it will be debated in the Indian Parliament and finally passed.

It is yet to be determined whether the Indian PDP Bill is closer to the EU’s progressive GDPR or to China’s policy of control. Either way, it has managed to irk both Big Tech companies and privacy advocates alike. Companies with data banks aren’t happy with the cost and hassle of compliance. They deem the bill as isolationist due to its restrictive certification requirements to operate in India. Privacy advocates highlight how the exceptions in the bill can lead to State excesses of control over our data. They warn of government mission creep. Mission creep is the gradual expansion of an intervention, here, it implies the dangerous possibility of the State having access to all our data in the absence of a Privacy Law.

This blog is an exploration of how the GDPR and PDP Bill are similar, yet different in various ways.

Coming to terms with the terminology

Before delving into specifics, it’s important to be acquainted with the terminology used in the legal mechanisms for data privacy. The two regulations also use different terms for the same entity:

 

  • Data processor: Any person or legal entity including the State who processes the data. This may consist of the data controller or data fiduciary itself or a third party.
  • Interestingly, the PDP Bill’s definition of personal data differs from the international definition in the GDPR.

Thematic classification of differences

The underlying principles and intent of the PDP Bill resemble the provisions enshrined in the GDPR. Aspects such as the need to have a clear purpose of processing personal data, consent requirements, personal rights, and the appointment of Data Protection Officers in organizations are closely adapted from the GDPR.

However, there are a range of differences between these two instruments of privacy. Here, the language and enforcement provisions aren’t compared, but the stance both mechanisms take on different issues.

These have been classified into the following themes:

1. Classification of data

 

Critical data has not yet been defined by the Indian government. Although the category resembles the list of “special categories” in the GDPR, the EU’s regulation has defined what the category entails while in India the government has the power to declare any data as critical data. The GDPR does not have separate localization rules for this type of data, unlike India. This is explained ahead.

2. Data localization and cross border data flows

Data localisation requires the collection, processing, or storage of certain types of data within the borders of the nation where the data was generated, before being internationally transferred.

GDPR stance

The aim of data protection frameworks is to protect the data while safeguarding its free flow. The GDPR has no hard data localization conditions. It allows for cross-border transfer of all types of data if the country of data transfer has an adequate framework of data protection.

PDP Bill stance

On the other hand, the Indian regulation’s requirements seem to restrict data’s free flow.

  • Sensitive personal data: This category of data when collected, shared or disclosed to the data fiduciary in India has to be stored only within the borders of the State. It may be transferred beyond the territory of India for processing, subject to explicit consent and conditions.
  • Critical personal data: Strict data localization norms exist for this category of data. It can only be processed within the borders of India. The problem arises since this type of data has not even been defined yet.

Due to firm opposition, the 2018 draft was amended to dilute data localisation requirements (such as storing a mirror copy of all personal data in India). Yet, the GDPR’s approach to handling data is considered more pragmatic since it ensures data gets similar protection once it moves out of the jurisdiction of the regulation.

3. Right to restrict processing

The GDPR grants the data subject the right to limit the processing of their data. This means that the processing of personal data can be stalled at an intermittent stage. This can be requested on the grounds of unlawful processing, data inaccuracy etc. The PDP Bill doesn’t enshrine any such right to the data subject.

4. Right to not be subjected to automated decisions

The GDPR grants the right to not be subjected to automated decision-making, such as profiling. Profiling is the automated processing of personal data to assess certain things about an individual. This right gives the data subject the recourse of obtaining human intervention. This is when such data is solely automatically processed to make an important decision, has legal consequences or significantly affects the individual.

For example, automated processing can be used to profile potential behaviour of an individual in a faster way. It is possible that the individual will not behave in the manner the results project. In that case, if such profiling affects the legal rights of the individual, the person can legally request human intervention.

The PDP Bill does not ascertain this right. While it encourages individuals to seek remedy through courts in case of such discrimination, it does not empower an individual to decide how their data should be processed.

5. Storage limitation

The GDPR lays down specific exceptions for increasing the storage period of collected data. These exceptions include public interest, historical, scientific, and statistical reasons.

On the other hand, the PDP Bill mandates the explicit consent of the data principal to store data for a longer duration of time than is needed to satisfy the purpose for which it is collected. The GDPR does not necessitate this consent.

What does this mean for your organization?

The most contentious question is whether GDPR compliance implies PDP compliance. It is briefly addressed in this section to understand how these bills affect an organization’s compliance needs.

  • Areas such as the anonymization standards differ between the PDP Bill and the GDPR.
  • With no parallel of ‘critical personal data’ in the GDPR, companies will have to be careful with their processing of this classification for India.
  • Unlike the GDPR, the PDP Bill also mandates the explicit consent of the data principal to store data for a longer duration of time.

Such differences and more, warrant that companies pay close attention to the compliance needs of the PDP Bill, even if they meet the requirements of the GDPR.

Other interesting follow-up questions will be explored in our next blog in the PDP Bill series.

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Signzy

Written by an insightful Signzian intent on learning and sharing knowledge.

 

Collaboration is the Key for Banks and Fintech Startups

Posted on | by Signzian

The banking ecosystem is in a continuous state of disruption. Traditional banks are trying to navigate the reality with legacy systems and hoping to switch to digital banking. Banking institutions are facing pressure due to rising customer demands for better customer experience.

For so long, banks and fintech companies stood on either side, competing against each other. However, they are fast learning that collaboration might be the key to their success. A joint venture between banking and fintech is the path to long-term growth, increased revenue, and satisfied customers.

Collaboration is the Key for Banks and Fintech Startups

Challenges for Banks on the Offline Road and the need for digital banking

The banking sector has traditionally relied on paper-based processes. Here are a few challenges banks face due to lack of innovation and digital banking:

  • Improving customer loyalty — Without a tech-enabled experience, it is challenging to provide convenience to the customer. When banks fail to innovate, they compromise with the services they offer. This, in turn, negatively impacts the loyalty of the customer.
  • Resource optimization — Without efficiency in operations, it is difficult to optimize resource usage. Both time and money are assets to any financial organization and a lack of technology hampers a bank’s ability to optimize its resources.
  • Personalization — Without data and analytics, personalization is hard to achieve. Therefore, banks face the constant challenge of learning about their customers’ varied interests and behavior when they don’t leverage technology.
  • Transparency — Trust and transparency get lost under piles of paper forms and applications. Therefore, banks that don’t opt for digital banking, fail to achieve process transparency and compromise with both employees and customers on the trust front.
  • Omni-channel — When customers want to make fewer visits to the branch, it is critical that their interactions with the bank be seamless across other channels. Digital banking can create an omnichannel experience through social media, website and mobile app platforms.

These challenges are not recent events, but banks have been facing them since forever. There was no way to resolve these issues, except by taking the help of fin-tech companies.

Why Legacy Financial Institutions are Under Urgent Pressure

The World Fintech Report 2018 by Capgemini outlines the following reasons why even the biggest banks face pressure today:

  • New business models — New trends such as Peer-to-Peer payments and lending, social network scoring solutions, and crowdsourced solutions are pushing legacy financial institutions to innovate.
  • Speed and efficiency — As customers demand better experiences, banks are forced to rethink their processes. Fintech startups are making digital banking accessible and convenient. Banks are expected to follow suit. Real-time updates, proactive notifications, alerts, and agile innovation are a part of the enhanced customer experience.
  • Transparency — That is something banks cannot achieve with traditional systems. Digital banking is needed to bring in transparency into the various processes. Fintech firms are leading the way by showing cost upfront and offering services at lower costs.
  • Personalization — Digital banking is better positioned to offer a personalized experience to their customers by leveraging data and analytics. If banks want to retain customers, they will have to level up their personalization.
  • Operational efficiency — Streamlines delivery and product development provide a significant competitive advantage. With a digitally-enabled solution, fintech firms are improving operational efficiency and pushing legacy organizations to innovate and reinvent.

Opportunities for Banks and Fintech Companies

According to a survey by PwC [1], 82 percent of insurers, asset managers, and banks plan to increase the number of collaborations they have with fintech startups over the next three to five years. And we see various ongoing acceptance from banks to collaborate with new innovation offered by fintech startup players.

Taking example from our own journey, presenting here case in point, Signzy, a platform that helps financial institutions:

  • Onboard customers through a seamless process that reduces hassle and friction.
  • Scale faster with an AI and ML-based regulatory engine.
  • Reduce costs.
  • Cut turnaround time.
  • Use advanced cryptography to create robust security and data protection infrastructure.
  • Leverage a range of white-labeled solutions to drive faster digital transformation.

Signzy is trusted by several large banking corporations such as ICICI Bank, SBI, Aditya Birla Financial Services, Mahindra Finance, Edelweiss, and so on.

Here are a few challenges Signzy’s fintech solutions help banks solve:

  • KYC — Banks need their customers to fill out KYC forms with their details. Traditionally, the process used to be paper-based. This meant that any mistake in one form would compel customers to start all over again. Signzy enables bank-grade digital KYC in real-time. An API matches the biometrics of the customer, checks the data in government records, and warns the user of potential document forgery as the customer fills in details.
  • Background check — Traditionally, the bank staff usually gather all identity documents from each customer and manually does a background check of the customer information. Signzy offers a simple and digital way to accomplish this. Algorithmic Risk Intelligence allows banks to do a holistic background check, discovering any court cases and legal lists, fetching anti-money laundering related data, checking the UN CFT List and NIA Most Wanted list.
  • Contracts — Signzy is replacing physical contracts with digital ones. These come with video and voice verification, blockchain implementation, biometrics, and high performance. Smart contracts are the way to go.
  • SME Onboarding — Merchant onboarding is a seamless task with Signzy’s offering that helps clients cut down onboarding time from 2 weeks to a few hours. Features include a mobile link with in-built regulatory rules, real-time document verification, Aadhar-backed contract signing, and AML background check.
  • Transaction Banking with Corporates — Signzy’s offerings can help banks automate complex regulatory procedures with AI and robotics to significantly reduce TAT and enhance the customer experience. Comprehensive risk and regulatory checks can help banks mitigate risk in dealing with large enterprises on both liability and asset products.
  • Insurance — The insurance process can be simplified and digitized with Signzy’s individual onboarding system. It simplifies the onboarding journey using advanced biometrics and fraud detection capabilities reducing risk and enhancing user experience.

There’s an entire list of solutions that Signzy offers to bank institutions to catalyze their digital transformation journey.

Roadblocks in Banking and Fintech Collaboration

Understanding the opportunity might not be equal to taking action for banks and fintech start-ups. Between varying cultures, different infrastructures, and ever-changing compliances, a collaboration between banking institutions and fintech companies is far from simple. Many opportunities and proposed deals get derailed as a result.

Here are top three things both sides must consider before finalizing a proposed partnership:

  • Consider any cultural gap — Make sure that the cultural match is not too challenging. There must be a willingness to adapt by both sides in a partnership.
  • Understand challenges — Collaboration with fintech startups can help financial institutions alleviate the major challenges they face.
  • Leverage data and innovation — The massive data that financial institutions have by their side is by far their most underused and critical asset. Fintech startups should leverage this data and innovate around it.

The success of collaboration rests with the organizations that can understand each other’s pain points and strengths, and work to improve the customer experience while reducing operational costs.

However, few fintech startups can offer the level of personalization, contextuality, speed, and seamless delivery to help financial institutions achieve digital transformation.

Signzy is capable of doing that. Want to collaborate with a forward-thinking fintech startup that can help you leverage digital processes?

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Moni Gupta

 

AI-Based Digital Onboarding Transforming Banking Organizations

Posted on | by Signzian

Customers are increasingly demanding better digital banking experiences to match the integrated experiences they receive in other industries. Financial institutions continuously find themselves under pressure to deliver a mobile-first, customer-centric digital experience to customers throughout their journey starting right from account opening. Artificial Intelligence has the potential to drive digital transformation in banking and redefine the way financial institutions interact with customers during the digital customer onboarding process.

The onboarding system is generally the first experience a customer has with any banking institution and that in itself sets the tone of the ongoing experience the bank can deliver. The client onboarding process is also critical by the fact that it gathers Know Your Customer Data for continuing maintenance and management of the account.

AI in banking has become a priority, and bankers have identified two areas worthy of digital transformation in banking – KYC and digital onboarding.

 

How Can Banks Offer a Seamless Onboarding Experience?

There are four critical areas in which banks can focus to revolutionize the onboarding experience they offer:

  1. Digitize processes, indeed

     Often financial institutions fail to understand that digital is more than online and mobile. Their customers demand sophisticated interfaces, but banks continue to work through manual and paper-based workflows. This way, bankers are rendered unable to answer customer queries about process status and task completed. Enabling a single point of truth of each customer and eliminating manual, disconnected processes will empower bankers to quickly onboard customers and collect and manage their information seamlessly. AI in banking will also increase the quality of data and help minimize errors.

  2. Allow customers to bank anytime, anywhere

     Digital transformation in banking will help customers to carry out functions 24×7, from anywhere using their preferred device or channel. In turn, financial institutions will be able to market products across multiple channels, improving sales and customer retention. By introducing an Omni channel experience through responsive web design, banks will be able to offer frictionless user experiences allowing customers to undertake the digital onboarding process on one platform and finish it on a different one.

  3. Collect data once

     Customers often face frustration when they have to provide the same information over and over again for different banking tasks. Digital transformation in banking can change that. Banks have started experimenting with end-to-end interfaces that allow customer details to be entered once and reflect everywhere else. This cuts down a lot of hassle for both customers and banking officials. In conjunction with AI in banking, institutions are also considering the applications of blockchain to consolidate data across a financial organization.

  4. Personalize experiences

     Predictive analytics can be leveraged to learn more about customer behavior- where customers spend their time, where they abandon sessions, and so on. With this data, banking institutions can personalize experiences for customers and expedite the digital onboarding process.

Banking organizations are ripe with data ingested by intelligent capture only waiting to introduce processing intelligence.

Digitize the Onboarding System & Opt for Online ID Verification

AI is helping banks set up a seamless digital onboarding experience. Consider this: when a customer opens a new bank account or applies for a loan, they have to provide a number of documents and ids to their banks such as employment proof, identity proof, and proof of address.

Additionally, the bank staff needs to physically scan each document to verify specific clauses, values, and statements in their process. Then, bankers need to verify particular intentions or assumptions with the customer before deciding each customer’s creditworthiness for a loan or a product.

These manual activities are tiresome and can very well induce error anywhere in the end-to-end process.

With intelligent capture and online id verification, this can be done with a few clicks on a smartphone. Thus, saving bankers and customers a lot of time and effort.

Since customer satisfaction is a crucial differentiator for banking institutions today, automating and digitizing onboarding process can prove to be a game-changing strategy. In other words, the client onboarding process can determine customer experience, loyalty, referrals, sales, and profitability.

Hence, Digital transformation in banking will help financial institutions adapt to changing regulations quickly. With manual paperwork, turning a few regulations every month can seem a daunting task, while digital processes make the process easier.

How Signzy is Innovating in the Banking Space

Trusted by ICICI Bank, SBI, Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund, Edelweiss, MasterCard, PayU, HDFC Bank, and many other financial institutions, Signzy is a classic example of a tech-enabled solution disrupting the banking space.

Through Blockchain and AI solutions in banking and financial services, Signzy is reducing human interaction with customers at various levels, saving it only for the critical decision making aspects of banking.

Here are a few features Signzy offers across its product line:

  • Digital real-time KYC
  • Digital signature for KYC
  • Biometric signatures
  • Algorithmic Risk Intelligence to provide a satisfactory background check
  • Digital contracts

Signzy can help financial institutions decrease operational expenditure by 75 percent.

Case in Point: How Signzy led digital transformation in banking for its client

The existing process consisted of the following steps:

  • The customer manually fills in the application form.
  • The bank sales associate collects the forms and KYC documents without verifying.
  • The branch manager screens all documents to make sure everything is in place.
  • The central ops do a risk check on the documents collected.

If the documents have anything amiss, they go back a phase and the process restarts.

Here are the challenges the baking firm faced because of their manual processes:

  • Errors in filling out forms.
  • No real-time verification of the information submitted by the customer.
  • Missing documents or details.
  • Time-consuming process.
  • Manual documentation that’s hard to maintain.

The solution to this firm’s woes was a digitized platform to disrupt their inefficient process such as Signzy.

The benefits Signzy realized for this institution:

  • As customers filled out digital forms and submitted to bank associate, the information could be checked in real-time.
  • The verification process was automated as a result.
  • The auto-populating of form quickens the process.
  • Reduction in human typing errors by data extraction.
  • Company verification from government records.
  • The user experience was transformed into a smoother one.
  • The bank ops could now focus on key risk cases and undertake high-value tasks
  • Since the bank saw a dramatic reduction in their operational costs, their revenues surged.

Signzy can bring out massive measurable benefits for their customers through digital transformation in banking.

Signzy realized the following metrics for its client:

  1. 80% cost reduction in customer onboarding process.
  2. Reduction in the TAT from 3 days to 30 minutes- a huge time saving and a differentiator in customer experience.
  3. Three times more efficient sales.

As of the end of 2018, Signzy supports 51 customer accounts and answers half-a-million API calls each month. Signzy digitally transforms businesses focused on financial services.

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Ankit Ratan, CEO-Signzy

 

Defining & Measuring Software Quality Attributes at Scale

Posted on | by Signzian

Managing a largely decoupled microservices-based system is always a challenge. We all have maintained an unpleasant bug tracker at some point or the other. Around a year back, when we witnessed a growth spurt, we felt a need for systematically tracking our production systems to capture the live performance of our products and any issues our clients might be facing. It is important to know what your end-users will face when using your products.

The problem with microservices is that the point of failure is not easily detected. A simple solution to this is a tracking id associated with every request. But, if you have already built a production system with hundreds of fully functioning microservices, adding a tracking id requires an unfortunate amount of code changes that may or may not change the code logic.

Also, we noticed that a majority of issues in our systems were not being reported. End-users frequently decide that it is easier to repeat the software activity rather than identifying & reporting the issues. A user may first think — “Probably I made a mistake & did not use the product correctly!”, “It was a glitch, just retry!”.

“Our job as software engineers should be more than writing code, but proactively identifying customer needs & make their experience better.”

Our Solution

Initial Thoughts

If you don’t assign a quantitative value to a parameter, you can’t track it and you can’t improve on it. Evidently, any parameter talked about in qualitative terms is as good as nothing.

Quality improvement is a branch of the larger umbrella of Quality Assurance. QI emphasizes on setting up the right parametric measures during the development and release stages, which will eventually help you measure how your system performs in the real world. Getting the actual data from the real world gives you insights on how your software is getting used outside the lab conditions (your development center).

We wrote an interesting article about one of our large implementations replacing legacy banking systems, which is expected to work in rural areas of India. see section World is not the cozy laboratory, we know that!. The article emphasizes on understanding your last mile user data & build for that.

Software Quality Attributes

When we first thought of creating such a system at Signzy, the first thing we addressed is the identification of Software Quality Attributes relevant to our systems which we are going to capture and improve upon. It is also advisable to classify them based on their criticality in your systems & impact it would have on your business if the said metrics decline.

An exhaustive list of system quality attributes in Software engineering can be found here.

We chose the below metrics and created definitions for each. While they are mostly standard, it should be noted that input and measured parameters can be customized to fit your needs. For instance, we changed the calculation methodology (which is intentionally omitted in the below table) for 4 of the metrics to fit an API & SaaS software we create.

 

Continue reading →

Video KYC — The Banking future is here!

Posted on | by Signzian

At a macro level, India seems to be going through an “identity crisis”. Not in terms of whether she is a potential superpower or a grappling economy, but instead which papers and bills identify its constituents as Indian citizens.

Zooming in to the fintech ecosystem of the country, constantly identifying individuals through Know Your Customer (KYC) processes is imperative, but the latest developments in the sector are far from bleak. The past few years have seen rapid developments in ideas and technologies, with the regulatory space dishing out amendments to keep up.

With concepts like Artificial Intelligence (AI), face-matching, and Computer Vision now a practical reality instead of something fresh out of a sci-fi movie, the processes of authenticating customers have taken a step away from the physically daunting and expensive task of onboarding. Along the same tangent, the regulatory body RBI is also tasked with updating their KYC compliance norms. The fintech space is fast changing, and sometimes companies developing futuristic tech have solutions relegated to waiting in the wings until official norms give them the green light. This may require sitting back with a tub of popcorn for a few years.

The build up here is to introduce an esrtwhile non-compliant, yet simple, secure, and scalable method to establish the identity of an individual: Video KYC (VCIP).

Reaching Compliance: The past

  • In an earlier phase of “identity crisis”, the question was whether the unique identification card “Aadhaar” had constitutional validity itself. On 26 September 2018, the Supreme Court affirmed its constitutional validity but scrapped Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act that allowed private companies to use Aadhaar authentication and eKYC.

With the 1,448-page judgment up for interpretation, a cloud of ambiguity loomed over India’s booming fintech industry; when was Aadhaar authentication to be stopped, and would the private space have to sacrifice the paperless, cashless and presence-less verification method it had adopted? Potential customers were seen on the opposite side of the regulations door as the industry suffered hiccups to onboard new customers after the judgement.

  • About six months later, on June 26, 2019, an expert committee on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), headed by UK Sinha, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) proposed the need for online video KYC. The panel recognized the drawbacks of physical presence and the sheer data handling required for even eKYC. Video-KYC was seen as a simple seamless process that could be done through a video chat where the customer can display documents. At that time the committee recommended it could be done through apps like Google Duo or Apple FaceTime.

Experts pointed out that considering these applications were of foreign origin, the RBI was unlikely to allow them. Under the Data Protection Bill, and the debate around data localization, the central bank was unwilling to let companies store customer data in foreign locations.

  • In the latest installment of updates, the RBI approved Aadhaar-based video authentication as an alternative to e-KYC on January 9, 2020. The amendment to the KYC norms allow banks and other lending institutions regulated by it to adopt a Video based Customer Identification Process (V-CIP) as a consent based alternate method of identity verification for customer onboarding.

Explaining Compliance: The present

Making sense of the latest amendments to regulations is not easy. We at Signzy have distilled it down to a 20-point cheat sheet to make sure it is. The changes due to the introduction of V-CIP are:

  1. Informed consent to be obtained from individual customer before the live V-CIP process
  2. RE (Regulated Entities) official to record video of the customer present for identification
  3. RE official is to capture a photograph of the customer during the session
  4. RE official to obtain identification information. This can be done through two methods depending on the entity type:
    Banks: OTP based Aadhaar eKYC authentication
    Non-bank RE: only Offline Verification of Aadhaar
  5. RE official to capture a clear image of PAN card which is to be displayed during the process
  6. Live location is to be recorded during the session
  7. RE official to ensure customer’s photograph matches them
  8. RE official to ensure provided identification details match the details on the Aadhaar/PAN
  9. Randomization of questions to ensure there is no pre-recording. This means that the sequence and/or type of questions during video interactions should be varied in order to establish that the interactions are in real-time
  10. The Aadhaar XML or Secure QR provided for offline verification should not be more than 3 days old
  11. Accounts opened through the V-CIP process will only be operational after a concurrent audit
  12. RE official to carry out a liveliness check
  13. The audiovisual interaction should be triggered from the domain of the RE itself
  14. An activity log along with the credentials of the official carrying out the process should be preserved
  15. Video to have a timestamp and be safely stored
  16. The amendment encourages the use of AI and face-matching technology
  17. RE official to redact/blackout Aadhaar number as per standard guidelines
  18. The interaction is to be necessarily done by a bank official and not an agent
  19. The process is to be operated only by specifically trained officials
  20. RE to ensure security, robustness and end to end encryption of the V-CIP application

This is a monumental step towards digitizing the authentication process for banks, lending startups and non-banking financial institutions.

Signzy: The future

Signzy’s video technology came into existence before the license to use it did. In 2016, bankers told us our tech was too futuristic and not practical, but now the future is here! Keeping up to its promise of delivering future ready digital onboarding solutions, Signzy is ready with a plug and play end-to-end digital Video KYC solution with V-CIP features.

Our systems are designed for banking grade technology which means they meet the strictest infosec regulations and data security requirements. Signzy’s video KYC is being used to onboard thousands of customers every month by SEBI regulated institutions. This solution has matured over dialects, browsers and low-internet scenarios. And also has one of the best facial recognition technology at the background (Can read more here)With RBI’s progressive move to bring Video KYC (Video Customer Identification Process) 2020, we look forward to onboarding RBI regulated institutes on our battle-tested solution!

If you would like to know more then look at the Video KYC section on our website

www.signzy.com

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Ankit Ratan, CEO-Signzy

 

India’s fastest growing Identity Verification company Signzy partners with Apriori for data aggregation services.

Posted on | by Signzian

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Paritosh Vatsal Tripathi

 

Removing blur from images

Posted on | by Signzian

Everyone misses perfect shots once in a while. Yeah, that’s a pretty shame (We all do that all the time!!!).

There are special moments which we want to capture to make them memorable for lifetime, but just because your camera shook or amount of noise in your camera can really hamper those special moment resulting in blurred images (Maybe your subject is on the move, the reason is not always bad cameras but bad timing as well!!!).

So, if you are also one of us who misses out their special moment, this post is just for you. In this post, you will get to know how you can restore blurred images. All the thanks and applause goes to Neural networks.

What are you going to learn?

From this blog post, you will learn how to make use of the neural network by image deblurring technique with the help of Scale-recurrent Networks. For more info on the technique, you can access this link. The network takes sequence of blurry images as input at different scales and produces a finite set of sharp images. The final output image is at the full resolution.

Figure 1: SRN architecture from the original paper

The method above uses end-to-end trainable networks for the images. Then it used multi-scale convolutional neural network with the approach of state-of-art.

These methods embark from an abrasive measure of the blurry images, and gradually try to recover the suppressed image at higher resolutions.

This Simple Recurrent Network aka SRN makes use of scale recurrent network for multi-scale deblurring. The solver and the corresponding parameter at each scale in a well-established multi-scale method are always same. This is a natural choice as it simply aims to solve the very same problem. If we vary scales in different parameters, then it may cause instability and the extra issue of unrestrictive solution space. Another concern to address here is the input images may have different motion scales and resolutions.

If you allow too much parameter tweaking in each scale, then this might result in creating a solution that is overfitted to a specific motion scale. There are people who believe that this method is also applied to CNN-based methods. Still, there are some recent cascaded networks that still prefer to use independent parameters for every single scale. They justify this method with a pointer which seems quite plausible. They proposed that sharing networks weights across different scales can significantly deteriorate training difficulty and also introduce stability benefit.

Their experiment shows that how with the help of recurrent structure and the combination of the above advantages, the end-to-end deep image deblurring framework can greatly mend training efficiency. They only use less than 1/3rd of the trainable parameters with faster testing time. Apart from this, their method is proven to produce high-quality results both qualitatively and quantitatively. Let’s not dive deep in the research paper for now. Allow me to present you our use-case of this deblurring technology.

We are well-established Global Digital Trust Company, which functions primarily in the domain of verification processes. For this verification process, our customers have to click photos of their documents and submit it for verification. There are probable chances where these photographs may be blurred either due to camera shake or any motion which causes difficulty in reading the document text.

To solve the blurred image problem, we fed these images in the aforementioned Deblurring Model. The results were exhilarating. Below are some of the samples,

Concluding Remarks

What do you learn from this blog? You learn the use of scale recurrent network for deblurring images. With this technology, you can easily extract data from blurred identity card images. You don’t have to poke your customers again and again for the re-submission of the documents due to bad-quality or blurred images. Thanks for the read and do leave a comment to let me know what you feel about this technology. Adios for now fellas!!!

About Signzy

Signzy is a market-leading platform redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses – using the digital medium. The company’s award-winning no-code GO platform delivers seamless, end-to-end, and multi-channel onboarding journeys while offering customizable workflows. In addition, it gives these players access to an aggregated marketplace of 240+ bespoke APIs that can be easily added to any workflow with simple widgets.

Signzy is enabling ten million+ end customer and business onboarding every month at a success rate of 99% while reducing the speed to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. It works with over 240+ FIs globally, including the 4 largest banks in India, a Top 3 acquiring Bank in the US, and has a robust global partnership with Mastercard and Microsoft. The company’s product team is based out of Bengaluru and has a strong presence in Mumbai, New York, and Dubai.

Visit www.signzy.com for more information about us.

You can reach out to our team at reachout@signzy.com

Written By:

Signzy

Written by an insightful Signzian intent on learning and sharing knowledge.

 

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