Amidst the pandemic, more and more retail investors are dabbling into stock markets to make some extra money while staying at home. The number of demat account openings increased by 27% at the end of 2020 compared to last year, to stand at close to 50 million.
However, as a trading platform, the question that beckons you is if you are capitalising on this opportunity by converting most of the users that sign up on your platform?
As it turns out, there is still room for you to optimise your customer onboarding journey and improve conversions.
Apart from the usual POI (proof of identity) and POA (proof of address) checks, most SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) regulated entities also capture a selfie, used as an application picture, and a self-video KYC, used to check if the customer is ‘live’ or not along with capturing their location coordinates.
From our own insights, onboarding millions of users a day, we can ascertain the more steps there are in an onboarding journey, the more likely are the chances of the customer dropping-off.
Think about it. A customer on a flaky network is more likely to drop-off than complete the journey if it takes too long. Or, a customer sees too many steps, abandons the journey altogether and flocks to a competitor providing a much simpler journey.
And of course, there are technical complexities that arise with having more steps. More integrations to be done, more API calls, more moving parts to handle. More possibilities to account for when assessing where exactly did the customer drop-off, understand why it happened and if there is anything that can be remedied.
Then there’s the cost element of it. Every incremental step puts a bigger dent on your purse.
There is clear merit in reducing customer onboarding steps to get the better of these challenges.
Here’s how HDFC Securities’ customer onboarding journey looks like
The self-video is the stage where the maximum number of drop-offs happen. It could be because of comparatively higher bandwidth requirements. Or possible rejections later on due to inadequacy at the time of manual review, which requires customers to re-do the journey.
To counter this, HDFC Securities’ innovative team alongside IDfy decided to optimise their journey and incorporate all the checks that were earlier a part of the self-video into the selfie capture itself.
So now at the time of capturing the selfie, they are also able to capture the geo-location of the customer, the IP address of their device and also check for the liveness of the customer.
The following responses are given as part of the liveness check:
- If the customer is live or not
- If a face is detected
- If multiple faces are detected
- If the image quality is good or not
With all these results now available with the selfie itself, the self-video becomes redundant.
How would this benefit you?
- More conversions
- Since you can now skip the self-video, it allows you to have a quicker onboarding journey which will ultimately lead to higher conversions and minimal drop-offs.
- Reduces operational effort
- These checks ensure that customers who capture improper images don’t proceed at all without capturing an acceptable image. Thereby ensuring your agents do not waste time in manually rejecting such cases at a later point.
- Improves the straight-pass-through
- A face match score is obtained between the selfie and the face on the ID cards submitted by the customer. If a certain threshold for the score is set, customers meeting it can be onboarded directly without incorporating a review leg. This improves your straight-pass-through and saves time in reviewing clear cut cases.
- Improves customer onboarding experience
- The shorter the onboarding journey, the more convenient it is for your customers. Give them the best-in-class onboarding experience.
Want to optimise your customer onboarding to improve conversions like HDFC Securities? Get in touch with us at shivani@idfy.com.
IDfy provides identity verification and customer onboarding solutions to leading financial institutions in India.
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