It’s been years since I opened a new bank account. The last time was in London. I was required to make two trips to the local bank branch, carrying a stack of documents. When I recently decided to switch banks, I was excited to try a 100% digital onboarding process for the first time. In counties such as Cornwall (where I live) you’d be lucky to find a brick and mortar bank branch within 20 miles. Using the bank’s new customer portal, my smartphone camera, and my UK driving license, I was approved in under 20 minutes. This despite several minutes of high anxiety waiting for the “approval pending” screen to change and confirm my wobbly selfie matched my driving license photo. It seemed like magic.
No doubt you too have experienced that moment of “will this actually work or will I be rejected again?” Fiddling with the overhead light glare and shadows to get that one good shot of your passport while trying to keep it flat with books that don’t ruin the picture. According to a study commissioned by ABBYY, some 40% of users have abandoned a digital onboarding process after an ID verification fail. If that figure is even half-right, a huge amount of potential sales are missing from any business with dodgy digital onboarding.
That’s the top-line value proposition for the growing number of proof of identity (POI) vendors who promise to eliminate those lost sales with their AI-driven solutions to read and validate IDs and other supporting documents. POI-focused startups such as IDverse (OCR Labs) have attracted sizable investments. Meanwhile, some established intelligent document processing (IDP) vendors have also joined the fray.
Lost sales are not the only motivation driving POI purchases. Fraud detection and prevention also require a strong defense to catch the foxes before they enter the henhouse. This inevitably leads to the classic sales vs. IT tension of “make it strong enough to catch the bad guys but friendly enough to retain the real customers.” POI implementation thus needs to be both user-friendly and painless, or people will continue the abandonment and go to your competitors.
Who is the buyer for this? Surprisingly (at least to us), it’s not always the fraud prevention team. Some POI vendors report more traction with the customer experience (CX) team lead. CX definitely has a dog in this hunt: without a user-friendly POI piece, there will be no “C”.
If you are looking for a POI solution, contact us and we can point you to the top vendors. Stay tuned to Deep Analysis for more coverage of the emerging POI market.