I have a pen, I have an apple…
Customer onboarding sounds simple, but is it really?
Imagine you have a great app. It is available on iOS, Android and for some undefined reason on Windows Phone. You have been working on it with your team for months. You have all the great features that is expected these days with a UX/UI that shines like the top of the Chrysler Building. You expect to make a fortune so you launch your app on different stores.
Despite you made everything you could, you still face the problem that you have hardly any users. Is it because you have no talent to stay on the market and you’d better bought bitcoins from the money you have invested to the development? Is it because you are on the wrong side of the world or your marketing strategy is not well structured? Well maybe. But there might be something really simple. Have you thought of there might be an issue with the customer onboarding?
We at Finastra Labs, have been there. Believe me we have a great app with shiny design and we also have a wide range of functionalities that are required to handle all possible needs in a digital finance software. We have made a huge effort to make every single pixel perfect but we forgot about the onboarding.
At Labs we have the luxury to stay at POC phase therefore we didn’t have to concentrate on fast and super effective onboarding processes but to tell the truth it is a critical part of the experience and if you fail to satisfy your customer’s needs by the first point of contact do not expect them to use and love your solution.
How to start
Make one step backwards. What do you expect to be the best registration process? It’s easy, huh? Have just one click and let me in, do not disturb me with all the registration form bullshit, get my data what you need somehow and let me do why I downloaded the app for.
Let’s get back to our Labs case. Honestly what you had in mind about 1 click registration sounds really great. Unfortunately I have to add the tiny little fact that we as Finastra are in the financial domain therefore we need to take good care of the security.
Don’t go far from your expectation
We have 2 things now. We have the great idea that comes from you my reader to have a one click registration and also we have the sad fact that regulators require super secure customer verification processes during the onboarding. So we are facing the problem of speed vs. security. Let’s deal with this problem.
How about asking the customer to simply show their ID-s to the camera of the laptop during the registration journey and smile. Sounds great, isn’t it? We have assumed that in 2017 examining one’s ID is not that hard. Simply take a photo of the card itself and let the OCR and Image recognition do the trick. Take another photo of the Customer that is currently making the onboarding and compare these.
How we tried
I am Péter Jámbor, I am an Innovation Manager at Digital Channel Labs. I’ve got this project to manage the implementation of a fascinating customer onboarding journey with my team.
Although Labs has wide range of knowledge in disruptive innovation projects we don’t have the time and sense to develop such algorithms that will recognise the image of the cards. But why would we?
Let’s go and find a solution on the market than -we said. Should not be too hard.
We have experimented many solutions with the same expectations. I think at this point I should dig a little more deeper so you understand what these expectations are when it comes to verify a person digitally with a simple ID:
Front validation — Ability to read data from the front of the card.
Back validation — Ability to read date from the back of the card.
Fraud detection — Ability to match and sum the data from the back and the front, and also check that none of the sides (or the image of the sides) were manipulated in any way.
Validity check — Understand all the grabbed data and decide if the card is valid or not (expiry day, ID type, etc.)
Face comparison — Ability to find and cut the image of the customer from the card in order to match the image that were taken from the customer.
Liveliness detection — Ability to detect if it is a real live person in front of the camera during the registration (and it is not a photo put in front of the camera)
Wide support — Support as many countries and as many different IDs as possible.
Availability — It should run on Web, iOS, Android.
Light-speed — Have all of the above mentioned as fast as Flash
You can imagine having this level of expectations will cause a massive headache to any provider on the market
Here are a few examples of the companies we contacted in order to help us
Impossible is (not) nothing
I must say we had a massive quarter by integrating all the listed companies’ solutions into our existing banking application.
Many-many meetings online, offline. Many-many paperwork. At one point, I felt like with every effort we make in order to have things work, we make steps backwards and will never get to where we want.
I don’t want to bore you with the details but after these 3 months I had to realise the fact that none of the currently existing providers is capable of matching all the expectations.
One is capable of reading the data from the front and the back separately but it is not compared. One is not recognising any image on the ID. One keeps saying that all the ID-s we try are faked. One processes for like minutes before getting the result. One is not available on some platforms. One is not doing any face comparison or if it does it is done MANUALLY. One is easy for the eye but a nightmare from development point of view. So on and so on…
Ranking
I guess you are interested in the result. The whole project was about to find the best available solution on the market, but defining “best” is not easy in this case. So we defined it various ways
By results quality
1. Mitek
2. Ariadnext
3. Au10tix
By development POV
1. Ariadnext
2. Au10tix
3. Mitek
By functionality:
1. Au10tix
2. Mitek
3. Ariadnext
So how to have a pen pinapple applepen
This depends on the domain you are at. You can do the PICORATO method but we as a financial service provider wanted to fill in all the gaps of the customer onboarding by implementing the latest technologies such as ID verification and Chatbot.
If you are happy to discuss or have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.
