Why is going digital better than keeping manual processes?
In the last post, we explained what Mati is doing (solve online identity), why Mati decided to enter Mexico (highest amount of fraud in the world, see graph below), and a few industries we are particularly interested in.
To continue this series, this new post aims at comparing manual and automated user verification processes. We are going to take as an example the most common verification flow where you ask your users for 1 official ID document and a selfie picture.
How most companies currently verify their users and “try” to be compliant
- The verification process always starts with asking users for some official identity document. Either for a passport or an INE/IFE. Depending on the business, you may also require users to upload a driving license, proof of address, etc… Many companies will ask for these documents via email, or on some custom onboarding screen within your website.
After talking to many of our clients and partners, we realized that too many times, users will send poor quality copies of their identity documents (out of focus, only partially visible, etc..). In general, people also get confused about what they should send exactly. When you review your users’ images, many times you have to email users back to ask for other copies of their identity documents. If the user is not already lost at this stage, a back and forth starts between the user and your company until you settle on good quality copies of the identity documents.
- Great! now you finally got good copies of your users’ ID. Now you will have the honor to manually verify the authenticity of users and their documents. In the case where you have the INE or IFE of your users, there are only 2 databases from the government you should check:
- INE website: https://listanominal.ine.mx/scpln/src/
- RENAPO website: https://consultas.curp.gob.mx/CurpSP/inicio2_2.jsp
So now, for each user, you should read the information written on the INE/IFE, go on both websites (hoping you did not make any typo), enter each database, and finally check that the information inside the databases corresponds to the data you can read on the card. For instance making sure that the first name, middle name, last name, date of birth are identical between the ID card and the database.
- Your verification flow should also ask the user to upload a picture of the user. In which case you would manually check that the face on that picture corresponds vaguely to the face on the INE/IFE.
You process is now done. Congrats, you’ve spent 10 minutes (in the very best case) of your life doing a task that a good algorithm would do in a couple seconds. This is a factor of x300.
You most probably realize that your company is not the only one with the need of verifying users. Also, it does not matter what company we take as an example, their user verification process will require the very same documents and will check the very same databases. Like the same way you do not want to re-build Amazon Web Services when you need to build a backend, there is no reason why you should re-build the wheel and re-build your own verification process. This is a block you should take from a third party specialized in this business. Here are the 3 reasons why you should automate your user verification flow:
- Speed: now that everyone is accustomed to “on-demand”, the word asap has a real meaning. And if your process takes even a few hours to verify identities, chances are you will start to see a drop in conversion rate.
- User Experience: Mati is specialized in user verification and asking for documents in the best manner is keep to our business. User interviews being a constant part of our development process, we make sure all our users go through the flow in a breeze. Check out our flow, you’ll see what I’m talking about :)
- Compliance: making sure that you check all the necessary databases to verify your users’ identities is very important and could kill your business if regulators discover that your process is not right.
- Scalability: Unless you want to hire an army of people verifying people all day long (which has a huge operational risk), automating the process if the only way to scale your business, start to accept huge user volumes (100k/month) and stay compliant.
Please reach out if you have any question!
