Reducing User Abandonment During Customer Onboarding

Companies and government agencies are supporting digital transformation initiatives, allowing customers to open accounts online using a computer and/or smartphone. These organizations and their partners are working with technology providers to implement digital onboarding solutions that comply with local “Know Your Customer” (KYC) regulations.

Despite the convenience of digital onboarding, many applicants do not complete the process. According to research from Signicat, 68% of users who start a financial institution’s digital onboarding process abandon it. Due to user abandonment (also referred to as customer churn), European financial service institutions alone may lose over EUR 5 billion each year. Other types of business such as retailers similarly lose customers and revenue due to cumbersome digital onboarding requirements.

The costs of a poor digital onboarding process are not only monetary. As organizations manage relationships with potential customers, FI Works has observed that customer experience has become a key differentiator of a brand. Organizations with a superior customer experience will excel, while those with a poor customer experience will falter.

Why Users Abandon Digital Onboarding

As an identity professional with over 20 years of industry experience, I have observed two reasons why customers may abandon a digital onboarding process:

Abandonment reason 1: The application process is too complicated. Some digital onboarding processes include a complex series of steps and require extensive effort from the applicant. Here are two examples of complexity that may lead applicants to abandon digital onboarding:

• To meet KYC requirements, technology providers may require the applicant to take one or more photos of an identity document such as a driver’s license. Manual capture of these documents is tricky, and failure to properly capture the photos causes user frustration and abandonment.
• To prove that the applicant is physically present at the computer or smartphone, the process may require the applicant to take a photo of themselves. To detect liveness and deepfakes, some providers require applicants to move their heads in specific directions. These head movements are often non-intuitive and tricky, which can frustrate users and lead them to abandon the process.

Abandonment reason 2: The application process takes too long. Two factors contribute to longer application times for some technology providers:

• The complexities described above can slow down the onboarding process. This video shows the challenges and differences between traditional and more streamlined systems.
• Some technology providers require people to manually verify the submissions. If the provider’s workload exceeds its manual verification resources, it may take hours, days, or weeks to verify the application.

A Technology Solution that Minimizes User Abandonment

Incode Technologies, from its initial heritage as a B2C service provider, has designed the Incode Omni platform to address the shortcomings found in other identity verification and authentication solutions.

The Incode Omni platform is a privacy-preserving platform designed to build trust with both the businesses that use the platform and the customers of those businesses. These six features of the Incode Omni platform support simple and rapid user onboarding.

Incode Omni Privacy-Preserving Platform. Incode Omni’s features eliminate the complexities that cause user abandonment during an organization’s digital onboarding process.

• Incode Omni is fully automated, requiring no manual intervention during identity verification. A fully automated solution saves time since customers do not have to wait hours, days, or weeks to have their identities verified. A fully automated solution also preserves privacy since no reviewer has access to the applicant’s PII.
• Incode Omni data processes at the edge, reducing transmission time, and minimizing the need to store PII in centralized servers.
• The critical algorithms in Incode Omni are Incode-developed. Unlike other identity solution providers who depend upon third parties for critical algorithms such as face recognition, Incode is the developer of the facial recognition and other essential algorithms used in the Incode Omni platform. Incode’s algorithms are validated by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and iBeta for accuracy and liveness detection.
• Incode Omni includes powerful orchestration to allow organizations to tailor their digital onboarding process to their specific needs. Incode offers over 50 software modules to manage digital onboarding. Organizations can orchestrate workflows with the specific components that they require for their own digital onboarding process. The result is a simple workflow that saves customer onboarding time.
• Incode Omni is flexibly deployed. Depending upon organizational requirements, Incode Omni can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution.
• Incode Omni employs secure partnerships with governments and enterprises to validate applicant data. For example, Incode Omni can easily and rapidly confirm with the relevant government authority that it has issued an identification card in the applicant’s possession, and that the identification card is not fraudulent. These verifications involve transmission and reception of a minimum amount of data, thus ensuring the protection of the applicant’s privacy.

Partner with a Superior Technology Provider

In summary, Incode Omni’s design allows organizations to implement digital onboarding that is not only simple to use, but also provides results to applicants quickly, avoiding the complexity and delays found in the solutions from some other technology providers. The Incode solution contributes to a much lower user abandonment rate for organizations that implement a digital onboarding process.

At the same time, Incode Omni’s design preserves applicant and customer privacy, increasing the trust that customers have in the organizations that employ the Incode solution.

Superior capture and identity verification are just part of the Incode Omni platform. The platform also offers superior solutions for all stages of the customer journey, including risk assessment, non-repudiation, authentication of enrolled customers, and management of critical transactions.

If your organization is undergoing digital transformation, or you are a partner to organizations undergoing digital transformation, and you want to implement a user-friendly digital onboarding solution that users will not abandon, Incode would like to talk to you.

Please contact us to learn more about the Incode Omni platform.