Find KYC Solution Provider for Your Customers ID Verification

When a business needs to add an element to its solution that is not in direct relation to what they are providing, it often leads to rolling the dice with a “good-enough” solution. 

For example, a small kiosk required to provide a toilet to its customers may go for an option that is by definition a toilet, but no one is happy to use it as such. 

KYC-regulated businesses generally have to focus on a million details with regard to their service without integrating extra verification steps into their operation.

This then may lead them to think: “let’s do something that works for now, then we can always improve on it later”

However, unsurprisingly, customers won’t do such a step in their heads…

and thus will rarely think: “even though it was a horrible experience…at least it worked, now let me get to using this wonderful service”. 

So let’s look at a few scenarios, where a business may think that their KYC solution is “OK for now” but are indeed shooting themselves in the leg.

1. Opting for a team of professional sales agents to do KYC on the side

Would you ask your sales agents to handle your financial reporting? 

Then why would you ask them to do something else they are also not trained to do? 

Sure a great sales agent will have the skills to handle complaints, but they’ll likely have no training in how to: 

• accurately match images with faces;
• check against necessary lists;  
• flag instances where the person’s identification was unsuccessful but is not yet denied;
• read thousands of different ID cards with data presented at different places;
• understand dozens of different languages and characters;
• making sure what they are doing is in fact in line with regulations

and on and on… plus your KYC service should not revolve around handling complaints. 

If it is, something is very wrong.

Not to mention, aren’t your sales agents supposed to be doing, you know… sales?

1. Working solely with an in-house, manual KYC team

What may seem like a perfect in-between most often turns out to be the worst of both worlds.

A manual KYC team in the company is usually set up when leaders merely look at the very “obvious” cost of salary/number of calls handled. 

(Or when finding a straightforward third-party solution without a million demos and sales calls seem impossible.)

The reality is that there are a large number of costs directly and indirectly connected to setting up a KYC process. 

Cost elements like: 

• the cost of training the team;
• the cost of manual labour misidentifying someone; 
• the opportunity cost of users giving up as a result of a slow verification process;
• the cost of fines in relation to missing one or some regulatory requirements;
• the cost of fluctuation;
• the cost of trying to manually identify someone in person for a hand-off and not being able to;
• the opportunity cost of bad retention rates due to competitors handling verification better

I could do this all day… but you get my point. 

Calculating your identification-related costs will take more than a simple hourly rate divided by the number of calls made.

1. Integrating an automated sequence based on a “simple” back & forth with the customers 

Automation in itself is not a be-all-end-all. 

The “wrong” automation can cause you more harm than good. 

While there are certainly options outside of working with an expert that may work in the short-term and may even temporarily seem “cheaper” » 

when you are looking for a long-term solution, that is:

A) able to cover your current needs with regards to customer satisfaction, regulatory requirements and security aspects

B) able to scale with your business and its increased requirements (serving significantly more customers, expanding to a new country, fending off new threats etc.)

the planning and consideration you put into your onboarding sequence should match the expectations you have for its success.

In other words: as a business that has to (both from a regulatory standpoint and for the sake of security) implement user identification processes, you can probably survive for a while with a subpar sequence…

You might even have enough capital to do with 1 or 2 major fines (then again why would you when you can so easily avoid them). 

Yet if your goals exceed “just surviving”, and they are actually closer to acquiring a significant slice of the market with sustainable growth »

then you have to understand how much your growth is affected by users’ content with your business, and how much that is affected by how they are greeted by your service. 

Because a user identification process is essentially one of, if not THE first impression a user makes about your service’s viability. 

In short:

Some solutions may seem “good enough” for the “time being”, but more often than not they can cause you long-lasting harm and way more money thrown out of the window, compared to opting for a fitting and lasting solution from the start.

Moreover, when you are able to focus on solving your problem and are not bamboozled into paying for a bunch of shiny features that you don’t actually need » 

you’ll find that a great KYC solution, with more sophisticated features, may actually be cheaper compared to your “cheap alternative”…

even when you just account for direct costs, and dismiss all the opportunities you’d lose with a lesser option.