IG Expands Into New Markets With Agile Identity Verification

Global Trading Provider Eliminates Overhead, Accelerates Application Processing

IG’s significant global growth in trading activity fueled a steady stream of new clients but also challenged the company to enhance its onboarding as it expanded into new countries.

“With the products we offer, our platform and execution is the best available, but client onboarding in most regions is quite a manual process, which could take many days for an account to be opened,” said Catherine Jeetoo, UK business change manager for IG, which was founded in 1974. “After much internal work, we realized that it is possible, with the right solutions, to automate a lot of this process.”

At the same time, IG was unwilling to compromise its high compliance standards, a point of pride for the company. IG needed a rigorous identity verification platform that enabled real-time access to reliable data sources in target markets. It also needed the flexibility to customize verification steps to meet Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance requirements across multiple countries and regions.

“We want to attract the active retail trader and investor to IG,” Jeetoo said. “But with fast-moving markets, people want to take advantage of the now, whether it’s a global issue such as Greece or China or whether it’s a particular stock they’re interested in. Having to wait for an account to be opened is a missed opportunity.”

IG needed the right balance of security and speed. Committed to further implementing digital identity verification, the company partnered with Trulioo.

Trulioo Helps IG Automate and Scale Compliance Processes

IG chose Trulioo for its scalability, agility, comprehensiveness, customizability and speed. The easy integration enabled automated electronic identity verification.

“In the UK and Australia, we have automatic verification, and we wanted to extend this into other territories,” Jeetoo said. “That’s when we contracted with Trulioo and started looking at additional countries where they could offer real-time identity verification.”

Among the advantages of partnering with Trulioo is its unique approach to reducing the number of required identity verification fields with built-in intelligence and common field mapping. Trulioo supports an extensive list of country-specific fields, including different name and address attributes. A reduction in fields enables clients to scale their businesses faster, smoother and more efficiently.

“We started with a test,” said Rajib Deysarkar, IG head of enterprise data and technology, Bangalore. “We created some datasets using [the Trulioo] web portal and started verifying on that platform against other solutions that we had. We also tested integration with [Trulioo] web services before trialing the API. We then participated in [the Trulioo] normalized API beta program. Our account opening team compared the portal application against the results that the automated service was giving.”

After that analysis, the decision was easy: IG deployed Trulioo in full in the selected countries. IG is now expediting application processing time and eliminating the overhead of its manual review process.

“We track all of the verification and nonverifications,” Deysarkar said. “We have logs, and in those logs, we keep a note of time when we make a web service request call to Trulioo web services, and the time it takes to come back. We see faster response times and a greater number of applications being processed.”

More Applications Processed and Faster Response Times

IG had strict vetting criteria for its identity verification partner. The company worked closely with Trulioo to vet data sources, reliability, compliance, technology feasibility and performance.

Happy with what it found, IG relied on the global expertise of Trulioo to optimize identity verification and automate KYC.

“The evaluation process was quite easy,” Deysarkar said, “due to extensive documentation from Trulioo.”

With that foundation, IG has been refining its identity verification strategy. The company is now implementing Trulioo for application reviews in additional countries.

“There are several steps we’re taking to make results better,” Deysarkar said. “Our goal is to cut identity verification time by half. We’re working with Trulioo to look at our results and identify even more areas of improvements to enhance our results.”

IG is continually improving to stay ahead of the competition and meet clients’ expectations.

“The process has been much smoother,” Deysarkar said, “compared to other integrations we have done.”

About IG

IG is a global leader in online trading and the world’s leading provider of contracts for difference and financial spread betting, operating in 20 countries. The company also provides an execution-only stockbroking service. Headquartered in the UK, IG Group Holdings PLC is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250.