HooYu Identify has been designed as a unique identity confirmation platform to help financial services brands easily and quickly complete Customer Due Diligence checks.  Our clients tell us that in the UK, they are only able to verify circa 70% of customers using traditional name and address database checks and that HooYu is a key component to help them verify & accept more customers.  In this blog post we will share our view why it’s key to have a plan to be able to verify and welcome that 30% that aren’t being catered for by traditional data-led approaches to KYC.

Match rates against UK identity databases tend to deliver verification rates of between 68-85% with most financial services firms experiencing on average a 70% match rate.  Some financial instruments such as money transfer and short term lending will in fact experience a lower verification rate due to their customer demographic.

Accept more customers, reduce your marketing Cost Per Acquisition

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s vital that a KYC process is able to accept and verify as many customers as possible.  The math behind the cost of losing 30% of your potential customers is straightforward.  The equation also worth considering is how not being able to accept customers impacts marketing KPI’s.

If the cost of driving a customer to your site ready to go through the application process is for example, £160, but you are only able to verify 70% of your customers that drives up the Cost Per Acquisition from what could have been a reasonable £160 to a more uneconomical £208 per verified and completed application.

Improve the customer experience

As the fintech revolution has continued, companies are striving to deliver the best possible user experience and digital journey as a differentiator against their competitors.  The companies that aren’t looking to use “reg-tech” to help look after their 30% non-verified customers tend to fall back on the tried and tested “Please email us a copy of your passport” or “Please bring a copy of your passport into a branch”. Not so much a great digital customer experience as a “Let’s resort to what we used to do before we tried to go digital”…

Speed up the customer verification process so your customers can deposit, borrow, spend or transfer money quicker

The companies that do ask their customers to email or upload copies of their ID documents are losing out on revenue where they take hours or days to receive and verify customer ID documents.  When a customer comes to your digital channel to create an account, they are ready to transact, to start using your fantastic financial service that pressed their buttons and motivated them through the application process in the first place.  Instead, firms that are manually collecting and reviewing copies of ID documents are asking their customers to wait patiently and twiddle their thumbs.  Surely there has to be a better way?

Increase your operational efficiency

The digital age affords opportunities for new business practices and new ways of managing workload.  Companies need not employ teams of costly agents to receive, copy, review and file piles of customer ID documents.   There is a way to save on manual overhead and not to have to train administration agents to spot whether a Bulgarian driving licence or a Polish passport is a fake or a forgery.  It’s called HooYu…

HooYu –  KYC for the 100% not just the 70%

HooYu Identify is a unique identity confirmation platform designed to help financial services brands easily and quickly complete Customer Due Diligence checks.  HooYu uses multiple identity technologies such as digital footprint verification, ID document authentication and facial biometrics to analyse and confirm customer identity across multiple sources.

It’s a simple process. If the traditional database check process fails, during the application, your customer is asked to use their phone or webcam to take a selfie, take a photo of their passport or driving licence and share their online identity such as Facebook or LinkedIn.  Then we crunch all the data to make sure that there is a real person behind their online identity, we check that they have provided a legitimate ID document and that this matches to their selfie and we give you the thumbs up that they are who they say they are.

The team behind HooYu Identify has been working in online identity technologies since the early days of the web and we’ve helped thousands of businesses to know that their customers are who they say they are.

If you’re ready to verify & accept more customers with HooYu Identify, please email Simon.Kelman@Hooyu.com for a quick online demo.  Welcome to KYC for the digital age.

9th October 2016 - David Pope