Digital Onboarding: Offering User Convenience with Security Compliance

Today’s lightspeed age of always-online engagement means unparalleled opportunities to reach and convert users right where they are in record time. Potential customers can hear about, research and sign up for valuable financial services in minutes. They can start a new bank account, finance a car, or take out a loan right from their phones. Well-designed digital onboarding flows make these once complicated processes seem simple and seamless.

But with unparalleled opportunity comes unparalleled risk. Savvy digital criminals have learned to bypass state-of-the-art security measures –even biometric checks. How can regulated institutions benefit from the incredible opportunity of online enrollment while successfully managing the risks? Let’s explore how secure digital onboarding solutions allow businesses to thoroughly vet new customers while offering an intuitive, engaging user experience. 

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Why The Need for Digital Onboarding Solutions?

Digital onboarding describes the process of acquiring and vetting new clients while familiarizing them with your business and its offerings. This once required multiple steps, including inconvenient visits to brick-and-mortar locations, and tedious paperwork. 

Many potential customers were turned off by the hassle, resulting in high lead drop-off rates, known as customer churn.  However, financial institutions could not afford to compromise on security measures for the sake of client convenience. 

Beyond that, firms in the heavily-regulated finance sector must comply with government anti-fraud, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and requirements.

Designing Secure and Frictionless Customer Onboarding Solutions

When signing up a new customer, how can a financial institution know that the user submitting the application is who they claim to be? How can they find out without turning off legitimate potential customers with too many high-friction security checks? 

The answer is to combine several techniques and technologies.

• Progressive Risk Scoring: instead of subjecting each new customer to the same security checks — either too lax or too stringent — progressive risk scoring dynamically assesses the risk of fraud at each stage of the user identification process.  

This process applies light KYC (Know Your Customer) checks to lower-risk users, and heavy KYC checks to users presenting any high-risk flags. This also reduces overall KYC check costs.

• Screening a user’s digital footprint: these technologies scour the user’s online presence, on email, social media, GPS, and e-commerce. Then cutting-edge algorithms identify suspicious patterns. 

• Biometrics: while fraudulent users can falsify some biometric data (like voice, fingerprints and facial recognition), these can still be a useful screening tool when combined with other measures.

• One-Click Integrations: take advantage of the vetting already done by other services the user frequents. Allowing users to provide some data through one-click integration with services like Google or Facebook increases signup rates by more than 8%, according to Heap Analytics.

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Client Onboarding Solutions

In B2B onboarding, fraud prevention and identity verification must be considered, but digital client onboarding solutions can also:

Centralize and retain client data, so that valuable client information stays with your organization. This ensures your team can quickly be briefed on any client account to provide the kind of personalized attention that grows client loyalty.

Create consistent client onboarding experiences. Efficient onboarding software solutions ensure that both your team and your client are absolutely clear on each step of the onboarding process. This streamlines the project flows from start to finish.

Reduce costly errors. Well-designed digital onboarding helps prevent missteps and missing project information that can cost client accounts. 

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With thoughtful design, it’s possible to build and implement secure digital onboarding software solutions which integrate user-friendliness with multi-faced security. This allows you to create a glowing first impression of your business for your customers, successfully manage risk and keep you in good standing with government security regulations.