Onboarding New Customers Leveraging Biometrics
In the digital age, customer onboarding has surely advanced towards improvement due to technology adoption by the companies. Such technologies include biometric recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which are being integrated in many companies for the onboarding process in order to simplify, authenticate and strengthen security. Biometrics work in such a manner where the individuality of persons are determined by their physical traits and how they behave, backed up by OCR which assists in obtaining information from original documents, ensures fast and secure means of identity check for customers. The purpose of this article is to discuss the changes that biometrics and OCR are bringing into client onboarding, and the merits & weaknesses that they offer to the businesses respectively.
The Push for Better Customer Onboarding Processes
With the globalization and business expansion to other nations which have their own laws and are cut-throat in terms of competition, there is that need to have simple and robust systems to secure and fast track the current customer onboarding process. Other conventional techniques of client onboarding and identity authentication such as document verification and physical interaction are not only dull and unnecessary but also present a great risk of identity fraud and human error. Moreover, nowadays where everything is about convenience, clients are not willing to wait to get out of their house to go and get an account, initiate a service or even guarantee a transaction.
The list of measures that must be taken at the outset of business, including fraud protection, complying with the relevant legislation, and enhancing customer experience, has topped the objectives of financial, telecom, and other industries within which identity verification is a must. In this respect, biometrics and OCR have turned out to be two of the key technologies that are able to meet today’s demands for safe, precise and user-friendly customer onboarding.
Biometric identity check during customer onboarding
Biometric technology is defined as an individual’s physiological or behavioural characteristics that can be used to verify his/her identity. The most popular biometric identifiers are the face, finger, iris and voice. In the context of client onboarding, biometrics can help deter fraud by making sure that the person who provides identity or other identification information is indeed the person depicted by that information.
Most probably, the biometric method that is most used in onboarding processes is facial recognition. This method verifies the customer by comparing a live image or video of the customer with the photograph on his/her ID documents such as a passport or driver’s license. Facial biometrics are the most popular among users as they are non-intrusive, easy to implement and most suitable for remote verification processes.
Another top biometric trait that customers or users utilize is fingerprint recognition. Additionally, every fingerprint is unique to a person, making them reliable for identification purposes. Due to the widespread use of mobile devices that support embedding fingerprint scanners, users can quickly and easily authenticate themselves.
Voice verification is becoming more and more popular in the fields of customer interaction with companies, mainly in call centers. Contact centers authenticate their users by analyzing the distinct voice structures of their clients to avoid them having to memorize any passwords or respond to any security inquiries.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Document Verification
Even though biometric verification is considered to be a reliable means of confirming the identity of an individual, document verification will still be an important step in the customer onboarding procedure. Optical Character Recognition or OCR is helpful here as this technology makes it possible to effectively and instantly convert images or pictures of written documents such as ID, passport or utility bill cards into the text data that machines can understand.
OCR performs the crucial work of capturing large amounts of text data by first transcribing, translating, and digitizing data from physical files. This leads to cutting down on redundancy whereby clients would have to physically bring documents during verification and manual input of paperwork into officially recognized systems. Clients can, for instance, choose to upload a picture or scan a copy of their identity documents during the onboarding phase. It then retrieves key details such as name, date of birth, address, document number from scanned papers and cross-checks them with official databases within seconds.
Integration of Biometrics and OCR During Customer Onboarding
With OCR and biometrics, there are numerous benefits regarding client onboarding:
1. Integrated Verification: The client record opening is by means of an application in which a selfie is taken in addition to the client’s identity documents. Through OCR, the data is read from the documents, while the client’s picture taken is matched with the image on the identity document. If the clients’ biometrics and the ID data are identical, the customer need not undergo additional verification processes.
2. Quicker Processing: In just a few seconds, customers can be validated using biometrics and OCR, enabling them to complete the onboarding in just few minutes. In fact, this being a quick technique lessens the chances of prospective clients abandoning registration – a common trend around manual validation processes that has several days lead time.
3. Improved Security: Businesses can seriously lessen their potential for fraud by layering the non-replicable characteristics of biometrics with the OCR’s ability to authenticate documents. This two-step method implies that if a paper document was counterfeited or exists without two-prong ID, losing the papers wouldn’t allow the fraud to circumvent the biometric security. Also, because many industries like the financial services are highly regulated industries and is governed by KYC requirements, biometrics and OCR also assist in ensuring compliance by providing secure and accurate identity verification processes minimizing the chances of manual errors and enhancing the audit level.
4. Smoother UX: The technology assists in enhancing user experience especially to customers. The integration of the technologies means that customers do not have to step out to physical sites or undergo tedious identity verification procedures. They are able to complete the process through their phones or computers wherever they are and at any time.
Benefits of Biometrics and OCR for Businesses
Biometrics and OCR in customer onboarding have considerable business benefits that include the following:
• Reduces Operational Cost: Outsourcing of identity verification processes reduces the amount of manual processes and in effect saves time and lowers operating costs. It also lessens the likelihood of expensive mistakes and diminishes fraud losses.
• Higher Conversion Rate: With a quick and seamless onboarding experience, customers are satisfied and their chances of dropping the signup process because of long verification periods are also reduced.
• Scalability: It is now more convenient to add customers as businesses can tap into a large number of customers in one go without compromising on security or precision.
• Data Accuracy: Where there is biometric information provided during the process, the report validates the sourced documents eliminating the manual input associated with data entry.
• Compliance: Given the existing KYC and Anti Money Laundering (AML) measures, customers are allowed seamless processing by adopting technologies that solve to the requirements of robust audit trails and customer identity confidently.
Conclusion
Customer onboarding is a very essential point within any business footprint, and using two more techniques such as biometrics and OCR improves security and efficiency within the processes supporting and increasing customer satisfaction levels. By utilizing these two technologies businesses can lower the chances of incidents of frauds while remaining within the scope of legal issues about the regulations. With the integration of these new technologies, we at TrueID are sure that the future of customer identity verification is without questions and increasingly smart-linked devices. For additional insights on more of our customer onboarding solution, do write to info@trueid.in.
