By Jim Close, Regional Vice President of Enterprise at Kofax
If the pandemic has taught retail banks one lesson, it’s that customer experience is more important than ever. And not just any customer experience – it’s all about digital. More consumers banked digitally last year, with 61 percent interacting weekly on digital channels, according to PWC’s 2021 Digital Banking Consumer Survey.
But the gap is widening between what customers want and what banks are delivering. Eighty percent of customers demand an omnichannel experience, yet 44 percent face medium-to-high friction in interactions, as discovered in the World Retail Banking Report.
But all hope isn’t lost. Thanks to new technologies, retail banks have the potential to transform their infrastructure to support new ways of working, streamlining everything from administrative processes through security and customer experience.
Fundamental to this approach is the adoption of digital identities. Just purely from an administrative perspective, in an online business world, wasting millions of man hours (on the employee and customer side) to navigate through a maze of manual processes to establish credentials or undertake due diligence is a ridiculous and costly exercise, not to mention an insecure one.
Using technology to create digital identities, however, is a much slicker approach. It delivers a number of benefits – one of the most important being the ability to deliver a superior, frictionless customer experience in a digital world.
Deliver 5-Star Service with Digital Identities
Whether a customer needs to show proof of age, residency or identity, the last thing they want is to hop in their car and drive to the local branch to do it. They expect to do it all on their mobile device, and retail banks who fail to offer this service will miss out on new customers and risk losing existing ones.
Digital identity technology enables retail banks to meet this customer demand through a combination of cognitive capture and artificial intelligence technologies that extract, verify and authenticate identity documents.
A quick overview of the process demonstrates just how simple it is. All the customer has to do is take a picture of the required document (driver’s license, passport, residency card, etc.) with their mobile device. They will also be prompted to take a selfie. That’s it.
However, behind the scenes, digital identity technologies are doing all the heavy lifting:
- Data is automatically extracted via optical character recognition (OCR). In the case of eChip documents, the NFC reader on the customer’s phone is used instead to access and read the information in the document.
- ID security features are verified, and an authenticity check is performed on the data. For eChip documents, the digital certificate is automatically checked against a third-party list.
- Tampering checks are conducted to identify any type of manipulation in text or images.
- Liveliness detection and forensic image checks makes sure the selfie is taken in real time and is naturally captured. The selfie is matched against the photo in the eChip document to verify document ownership.
The customer doesn’t have to wait for any of this, however, creating a seamless process for onboarding, loan applications and other new service offerings. The digital approach also speeds up document processing time, so the approval process is quicker. A fast, friction-free approach improves customer satisfaction and lowers attrition rates.
But there’s also something in it for your bank, too. Your customers aren’t the only ones saving time. Your employees no longer have to manually process and verify identity documents – and your data is more accurate. Staff can refocus their time on tasks that require more thought and add more value, which can further improve the customer experience.
Authenticity and verification checks enhance security, improving fraud detection, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks, and compliance with regulations like GDPR and PSD2.
How to Get Started without Breaking the Bank
You may be sold on the value of digital identities but are wondering how you can get started – especially as you may still be heavily reliant on legacy systems which can slow down modernisation and innovation. Fortunately, you don’t have to gut everything and start from scratch. An intelligent automation platform provides a variety of technologies enabling retail banks to bolt on to existing processes.
A software platform grows with you as your needs change, so you don’t have to worry about making investments in technology you’ll outgrow in a few years. Some intelligent automation platforms are also low-code, which makes it possible for retail banks to put more people to work on the digital identity initiative. An intuitive interface with drag-and-drop features opens the door for citizen developers to automate workflows and processes, speeding up the ROI on your investment and the road to happier customers.
Is your retail bank worthy of five stars? It’s time close the gap between what customers want and what they’re actually getting – and deliver service with a (digital) smile. The reviews are in. Digital identity technology is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s imperative.
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