Mix + Match: 3 Strategies to Streamline Financial Services Onboarding

Financial services organizations face the constant challenge of mitigating fraud and achieving compliance while meeting customer expectations for speed and convenience.

Fraud is always at the front door and always evolving. Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) requirements change in response to those and other threats and shift depending on where an organization does business.

On top of that, global financial services companies need access to the right data, technology and techniques to verify people and businesses. They also need the local expertise to determine what data works best for different countries. 

In other words, financial services firms need a full suite of verification tools to meet customer expectations, achieve compliance and expand their global reach. The key is making sure all those tools are in the same box and working in tandem. 

When businesses mix and match verification methods, they can gain the flexibility they need to reach their compliance, performance, cost and security goals. Here are three strategies to help financial services companies streamline customer onboarding and ensure secure, compliant experiences.

1. KYB + KYC: Integrate Consumer and Business Verification

Trillions of dollars ebb and flow in the vast global wealth management sector, making it a frequent and significant fraud target.

Financial services firms might turn to multiple verification vendors for relief. But if they don’t work well together, customer onboarding slows down, which, in turn, can lead to abandonment.

For instance, an online trading platform meeting regulatory requirements when onboarding a business faces a maze of point solutions and system integrations, often accompanied by manual verification. The organization has to navigate solutions for business verification as well as KYC and AML checks on ultimate beneficial owners.

It’s the time-consuming fallout from point solution clutter. Organizations accumulate one solution after another as they enter new markets, encounter emerging fraud threats and adjust to different regulations around the world.

A holistic approach to person and business verification through a single platform can position companies to avoid those complexities and optimize onboarding. They can configure workflows with waterfalls of capabilities, allowing KYB checks to flow into KYC or AML.

When a platform weaves KYC, KYB and AML together in a single onboarding workflow, organizations gain the flexibility to adjust quickly to any verification challenges. They also gain the freedom to shed no-longer-needed point solutions.

2. Data + Docs: Find the Perfect Match

Streamlined customer onboarding often depends on how efficiently organizations route clients to the verification type or data check that works best for the demographic, market or compliance requirement. 

In some situations, a data approach can meet regulatory requirements and deliver a swift user experience. For other markets or risk scenarios, an identity document approach is more suitable. 

The key for organizations is understanding market realities and customizing verification to accelerate onboarding. It makes sense, for instance, to prioritize identity document verification in countries lacking data sources, for younger people with thin credit files and for high assurance to mitigate fraud.

That task isn’t easy, fast or cost-efficient when organizations juggle different vendors for different verification services and have to know how to choose between data and document checks. The calculus changes, though, with an identity platform that enables preset rules that automatically route people to customized onboarding workflows configured for specific countries, demographics or other factors. 

Financial services organizations can identify optimal combinations of personally identifiable information matching, ID document review and watchlist screening to improve verification rates and mitigate fraud. Those same intelligent routing principles can help organizations prioritize specific data points, such as birthdate or address, that perform stronger in certain regions.

3. Micro + Macro: Back It Up With Local Expertise

Every potential customer in every market presents a unique verification challenge for a financial services company.

The elements that form the challenge range from broad, countrywide tendencies to specific details about a customer. Some countries prioritize ID numbers. Others rely on first initial, rather than full first name, for verification. In some areas, apartment numbers are inconsistent, making it difficult to verify addresses.

Verification around the world, whether for businesses or people, requires access to a sweeping spectrum of data sources. For instance, if a brokerage firm sets a verification routing rule based on duration of residence, it could automatically check against credit data sources for those who have lived somewhere for more than a year and telecommunications sources for less than a year.

Those rules routing to macro or micro data sources optimize verification based on customer details. But they’re rooted in local expertise. 

Global and local data source acquisition takes time companies don’t often have as they expand into new markets. And without local expertise, organizations might not know how to use the sources, which limits onboarding precision. 

When data sources and local expertise are combined to support a full suite of verification capabilities, companies can wield the power of an identity platform to achieve peak match performance, drive global expansion and mitigate risk.

Mix + Match Verification Services for Optimal Performance

The finance sector has a world of expansion opportunities. It also faces an unending series of compliance concerns, fraud threats and onboarding challenges. 

Organizations have access to verification tools, data sources, state-of-the-art technology and local expertise. When those capabilities are combined across a global platform, financial services companies gain the flexibility to quickly and securely onboard any person, any business anywhere in the world.