Seamless Onboarding of Customers to Drive Digital Transformation

As the COVID-19 crisis lingers, social distancing continues to create challenges and opportunities for businesses to accelerate the digitization of their products and services. While many retail-based and customer-facing companies are getting this right, many lending institutions need to catch up — fast.

Securing a financial product carries more weight and effort than some other products or services, in part because of strict identity verifications and regulations to protect parties from criminal activities. Even so, today’s consumers have come to appreciate the ease of purchasing a range of financial products and services online. As the pandemic waxes and wanes, more people will apply for credit solutions digitally. However, financial institutions that provide holistic, fully integrated, seamless solutions that optimize consumer experiences and risk assessment aren’t always easy to come by.

Where to start?

It all begins with onboarding. Once the strategic marketing of products and services has enticed customers to engage with a company online, their initial experience is make or break. Onboarding needs to be simple, intuitive and even rewarding. The slightest frustration can lead to the loss of a lifelong customer.

Seamless onboarding isn’t just a business process but a business philosophy that goes beyond quick-and-easy digital entry points. It has implications for long-term retention, positive referrals and increased revenue. Forward-focussed lenders in the financial services industry are rethinking their entire customer journey, making digital account opening, management and maintenance personalized enough to meet individual needs and secure enough to protect against fraud.

Here are four best practices to help businesses stay ahead of the curve.

Global research by TransUnion¹ revealed cumbersome onboarding processes for credit card and personal loan products across banks and other lenders. These findings present significant opportunities for enhancement and simplification.

“Mystery shopping” study revealed opportunity to streamline and improve onboarding experience for new loans

TransUnion “Mystery Shopping” research highlights the burdensome and lengthy process required for credit cards and personal loans.

A “friction-right” experience entails a quick and easy onboarding process done in one sitting — anytime, anywhere — with enough checkpoints to ensure consumer confidence in privacy and security.

Businesses with comprehensive digital onboarding processes use innovative technologies to create extra levels of consumer and business benefits.

To begin, digital document authentication and facial recognition validate ID documents for KYC/AML purposes to prevent fraud. These tools then extract personal information to prefill application fields automatically. This enriches the consumer experience, produces a more accurate fraud risk assessment and reduces false positives.

Finally, automated underwriting software assesses the consumer’s ability to pay based on actual or estimated income and credit history and presents an accurately personalized offer to the consumer.

The culmination of a seamless onboarding journey is credit fulfilment through disbursement or issuing a digital “instacard.”

With the increased use of digital channels for onboarding, verifying identity against a broad set of personal data provides greater identity confidence. For this reason, a truly secure onboarding process requires comprehensive, up-to-date identity data from credible data sources, such as credit agencies, government agencies, telcos and utility providers.

Traditional lenders can no longer afford the cost of manual or disjointed onboarding processes for credit card and loan applications. But, whereas new companies are popping up every day offering niche solutions, it’s cumbersome, time-consuming and often risky to expect multiple partners to provide a seamless, end-to-end digital onboarding experience.

Conversely, a single, best-of-breed data and technology platform solution can achieve a 25–30% increase in operational efficiencies by streamlining the time, resources and cost of prospecting, evaluating, risk-assessing and contracting various providers.

Where does it end?

It doesn’t. Seamless onboarding goes way beyond digitizing manual admin. As consumers push for more processes and transactions online, the transition to seamless onboarding means looking at each step in your process, then linking them with clean data and advanced technologies that extend throughout the entire customer journey.

Embracing the philosophies and best practices of seamless onboarding and effectively executing them will play a vital role in your business’s success. At the same time, a continuous and holistic, end-to-end approach to digital transformation will benefit your organization and better engage your customers.

TransUnion Seamless Onboarding for your digital transformation journey
TransUnion Seamless Onboarding encompasses identity verification, fraud prevention, credit/risk decisioning, workflow and orchestration to create an effective, end-to-end onboarding solution. This allows lenders to deliver a “friction-right” onboarding experience while increasing conversions and loyalty, reducing fraud and driving operational efficiencies.

TransUnion International launched Seamless Onboarding in the Philippines later this year.

Please visit our webpage for more information about our digital onboarding solution or any of our fraud and verification solutions.

^{1TransUnion “mystery shopping” onboarding study, 2019.}