Category: Technology

Welcome to our Technology category, a dedicated hub crafted to explore and delve into the latest technological trends reverberating through the fintech industry. As an innovative fintech entity, we stand firmly in our belief in the transformative power of technology. We see it as the catalyst reshaping the financial landscape, making it more efficient, secure, and customer-oriented.

The articles housed in this category dive into a multitude of tech-centric topics. We discuss everything from the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in reshaping finance to the profound impact of blockchain on financial transactions. Our objective is to provide an exhaustive perspective of the tech landscape, spotlighting how technological advancements are revolutionizing the financial industry and opening up new avenues of opportunity.

At Signzy, we harness the power of cutting-edge technologies to craft our innovative fintech solutions. We remain steadfast in our commitment to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, continuously evolving our product offerings to deliver the best, most efficient solutions to our clients.

Whether you’re a fintech professional immersed in the sector, a technology enthusiast passionate about the latest developments, or simply an individual curious about how technology is driving transformation in finance, our Technology category offers a wealth of valuable insights.

We cordially invite you to join us on this fascinating journey as we explore the world of fintech technology, discussing its pivotal role in shaping the future of finance. Step into this exciting realm with us, as we unravel how technology is not just influencing, but defining the next generation of financial services.

Digital KYC

Digital KYC: Transforming Credit Card Onboarding

Posted on | by Signzian

Digital KYC, with its innovative approach to customer verification, is ushering in a new era for credit card onboarding. By marrying state-of-the-art technology with traditional Know Your Customer procedures, it promises a more efficient, rapid, and secure experience for both financial institutions and their customers. This transformative tool not only optimizes the application and approval processes but also bolsters trust and regulatory compliance. As we venture further into the digital age, the profound influence of Digital KYC on reshaping the credit card landscape becomes ever more apparent. Join us in exploring this remarkable shift in the financial sector.

The financial services marketplace is extremely competitive. As such, acquiring new credit card customers is never easy. The task of successful customer onboarding is often even tougher. Many documents around company credentials and financial statements need verification. The KYC onboarding process is required to meet complex regulatory requirements.

The nature of the documents required for KYC onboarding of a new credit card application can be complex. This often leads to interactions between the sales teams and the customer. Getting the correct documents to complete the KYC onboarding often causes unexpected delays. This leads to poor customer experience and a loss of revenue for the company. Another important aspect is a lack of digital automation in the KYC onboarding process. This leads to longer onboarding cycle times. The resulting delays negatively impact customer experience. The subsequent outcome is a loss of revenue for the card company. This is because customers cannot be charged until they start using their cards.

Challenges For Customer Onboarding For Credit Card Applications

An article by FintechFutures highlights the Forrester Consulting survey. It predicts that on average, clients are contacted ten times during the KYC onboarding process. The clients are asked to submit between five and up to a hundred documents. Also, it costs up to $25,000 per client, with the average cost calculated at $6,000 per new client. The following are the challenges of the current process:

The lack of structured process

KYC onboarding needs to follow different processes. This can be across departments such as credit, legal and operational. The tricky part is that every compliance officer (or compliance department) might have their own interpretation of regulations. Thus, they end up having their own process specific to their own department/entity within the bank. It also means that they will have three different interpretations of regulations/processes. Moreover, customers are likely to get confused on why they need to provide the same information at several points of the process. This information can be duplicated in nature for several different parties.

Changing regulations

In today’s world, KYC regulations are changing on a monthly or weekly basis. Hence, banks need to adapt their systems accordingly. They need time to explain to the client why new changes are happening. They must also ensure that the changes are amended in the KYC digital onboarding process. Due to endless regulations, banks need to re-visit current operations/processes. They must now rely on new technology initiatives. For ex: process reengineering, digital transformation etc to make themselves compliant.

Culture

Financial institutions always tend to have a close relationship with their clients. Underinvestment in strategic opportunities (such as KYC onboarding) is still missing. This is along with the drive to understand customers changing needs and market dynamics. McKinsey conducted a recent survey among the global executives across the world. In the report, culture accounts for 33% among the most significant barriers to digital effectiveness.

Access

With modern technology, banks are getting increasing pressure to do everything on a real-time basis. For example, a customer expects that everything needs to be available on mobile. This can help them avoid visiting the branch and accessing the app from anywhere at any point. Modern banks are still using legacy systems. This leads to a challenge in providing customers with an end-to-end digital experience. With advancements like robotic process automation (RPA), banks can easily overcome this hurdle.

Time-consuming processes

The entire process of KYC onboarding can be very time-consuming. This is due to the vast number of documents needed, multiple touch points and departments involved in the process. Also, it changes for every entity within an organization. For example, a bank has three different entities: corporate, retail and insurance businesses. These can cater to different types of businesses/customers.

Quality

As per PwC, the remediation exercise of the customer has shown that due diligence process varies from each and every entity, from country to country. Thus, the quality of the experience can vary to a very large extent within one financial services entity. So if a customer visits the same bank in Singapore and India, their KYC onboarding experience will vary. I understand a lot of processes are country specific, but that is something which needs to be addressed.

The Need For Speed In Digital Onboarding

Onboarding digital banking customers is a real pain point for banks offering credit cards. This affects user experience by a great deal. Banks heavily invest in attracting new customers. They also talk to existing clients for additional facilities. The challenge here is that with product application workflows are slow and complicated. Another factor is that a poor KYC onboarding process can seriously undermine these efforts.

  • According to a Marketforce survey, onboarding a new customer takes less than 10 minutes at 32% of incumbent banks. However, it still requires more than 24 hours at 19% of financial institutions.
  • Almost 39% of respondents can’t even onboard entirely on digital channels.
  • An astonishing 40% of banking consumers abandon their application, according to a survey by Signicat.
  • Approximately 39% give up because the process drags on too long, while 34% drop off because too much personal information is required.

This calls for an efficient, digital KYC onboarding which not only provides efficiency, but also speed. Simply taking the process online is not the only contributing factor to this. Most customers require an experience like Netflix or Uber — where efficiency as well as time coalesce.

Fighting Frauds With Digital KYC onboarding

E-commerce fraud is becoming more and more widespread and sophisticated. It is a concern for online retailers around the globe. This risk exists because it can be difficult to verify the identity of who is using the card in an online setting. Asking for the card security codes (the 3–4 digit code features on the back of credit and debit cards) is a good preventative measure. Unfortunately, it isn’t always enough.

  • In a survey by Experian, 63% of US businesses reported fraudulent losses in 2018.
  • Reports from Juniper Research that online retailers are set to lose an estimated $130 billion between 2018 and 2023 in digital card-not-present (CNP) fraud.
  • A study by Javelin Strategy & Research in 2018 showed that CNP fraud is 81% more likely to occur than “card-present” in-store credit card fraud.

In its most general terms, credit card fraud refers to a fraudster making a transaction with an online business. This can be done through illicit means mostly by:

  1. Stolen credit card information
  2. Stolen ID
  3. Fake credit card details

The preferred and most convenient way to prevent this is KYC. Many banks, insurance companies, and other types of financial institutions have a KYC onboarding procedure in place. This ensures that their customers and clients are who they say they are. It also helps these institutions to get to know their customers. The companies can also verify whether clients are involved in any illegal activities. Ex: money laundering or bribery.

Implementing the KYC onboarding process stops online fraud before it can happen. It typically involves providing one or more documents to the institution that confirms their identity. These documents can include:

  • Government ID
  • Drivers License
  • Passport
  • Aadhaar Card

In addition, KYC verification compares the collected data against several AM/CFT databases. It also conducts checks for forged documents and bogus information. This makes KYC onboarding the perfect tool for combating frauds.

Make The Plastic Fantastic — Digitizing The Credit Card Application process

Competition is fierce when it comes to credit card issuing. Many of the traditional approaches to differentiation are losing effectiveness. Interest rates have evened out across cards. Large issuers continue to capture a bigger share of transactions. However smaller issuers are gaining market share in outstandings by bringing portfolios back in house and developing highly targeted customer-management campaigns.

From customer acquisition to onboarding to payments, the digital channel is becoming the most effective way to engage cardholders. It enables issuers to enhance the customer experience. It also helps set the stage for the use of big data and advanced analytics techniques. This can help improve decision making.

  • McKinsey research highlights that clients are willing to engage digitally, and often start their journey via digital channels.
  • More than 80% of US-based customers research credit cards online before acquisition.
  • More than 25% customers get personal recommendations via social networks to keep them updated on purchase decisions.
  • About 28% of credit card sales are made through digital channels, and two-thirds of the clients activate their new cards online.

Two major areas to be covered for digitizing customer experience are:

  • Customer acquisition, which specifically involves converting clients from consideration to the application phase. It includes getting them through the approval process in the real-time digital surroundings.
  • Customer onboarding after an application for a credit card is approved. From the customer’s point of view, the days that follow are either full of pain points or lacking in any kind of contact with the issuer that might help cement the new relationship.

Digital KYC Onboarding for Credit Card Application Process  — The Game Changer

The first step in building a relationship with a new client is enhancing the application procedure to be simple, seamless, and quick. The fewer the fields to complete, the faster the application. For example, applicants can enter their demographic information via their smartphone camera. This can be used for verification through facial recognition. Some issuers have managed to cut completion times by up to a third. They have also raised completion rates by more than a quarter. In addition, an increase in digital applications by 40% is acheived by simplifying the application process.

The second step involves engaging new clients so they use their card early and often so that usage becomes a habit. For example, In India, most credit cards require holders to spend a particular denomination in the first 90 days to qualify for reward miles. An analysis by McKinsey shows that the long-term value of a client is up to 3x greater when they are engaged frequently in the first 90 days. However, many issuers assign only about a fifth of their marketing budget to this critical time period.

CoronaVirus Crisis — Issuing Credit Cards Online

From the start of the Covid-19 lockdown, loan and card issuers have come to a grinding halt. This is mainly because both require representatives to visit the applicant for paperwork. The resultant decline in business has forced lenders and card issuers to focus on digital lending.

There are plans in motion for users to issue credit cards while sitting at home, with zero paperwork. On approval, the funds will be credited directly into your bank account or the card will be sent to your address.

According to Livemint, the intermediaries, banks and other financial institutions are requesting the regulator and the government to encourage banks to use the Central KYC (CKYC) and Aadhaar-based KYC.

There are also talks of VideoKYC being used for digitizing issuance of credit cards. As per the RBI notification, when lenders are doing V-CIP, an official needs to be present on the other end for verification. The client has to furnish documents to the official over the video during the procedure. Also, it’s a real-time process that needs to be recorded and stored. Further, the online process eliminates the requirement of physical signature. The same process can be applicable for card issuance.

The New Age KYC Technology By Signzy

Signzy offers a unique AI-based electronic KYC solution called RealKYC. It is a comprehensive suite of micro-services that offers smooth onboarding of new applications for credit cards. It also offers risk management and fraud mitigation.

Signzy has also launched its unique VideoKYC solution for real-time verification. This can be done remotely. VideoKYC strictly maintains compliance with RBI and SEBI guidelines. It is a secure, hassle-free tool for onboarding.

Here are 3 major benefits that RealKYC :

  • Hassle-Free Application Approval: When a new application is received for a credit card, it has to be approved by several officials. It undergoes severe scrutiny before the application moves to the back end for processing. With RealKYC, there is no need for back and forth. This is because multiple checks can be performed by officials simultaneously. This makes the process efficient and hassle-free.
  • Credit Checks: Signzy’s unique set of APIs perform comprehensive credit checks against the applicant. This is done to check for worthiness, past default details and so on. which could lead to potential credit risks if the applicant is approved.
  • Background Checks: Real KYC performs in-depth background checks of the credit card applicant. This may include cross-referencing the applicant against multiple AML/CFT databases, negative checks against registered court cases, etc.
  • Real-Time PAN verification with VideoKYC; Signzy’s VideoKYC solution offers real-time PAN verification. This helps authenticate the originality of the document. It also conducts background credit checks against the PAN number.
  • No Photocopies: With VideoKYC, just show the original ID proof and the official on call can take the snapshot as part of KYC proof.

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.

 

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.

 

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