Acquisition

When reviewing your current onboarding process, it’s important to step back and identify your goals. Are you looking to tweak your current systems or overhaul them completely? What’s your primary goal – to reduce friction, improve data capture and verification, or enhance system integration? Experian’s team of experts can help you define what needs to be done and the best way to achieve it within your budget.

Although it’s natural to focus on improving customer experience, it’s important not to overlook other onboarding requirements. Capturing the right data at the outset will give you useful insights in the future. These can help you forge a stronger relationship with your customers and recognise cross-selling opportunities as they arise.

Capturing the data you want is just one part of the equation; the other part is checking that the information you’ve been given is valid. An integrated identity and fraud platform like Experian’s CrossCore can verify who you’re dealing with and whether they present a potential risk to your business. It also ensures that the data you capture is clean and in a consistent format.

A platform like CrossCore can also help lenders by automating credit approvals. Decisions are based on the parameters you choose, so you can fine-tune the results based on your organisation’s appetite for risk. A speedier response also cuts the likelihood that your customers will take their business elsewhere.

Improving customer onboarding can help avoid friction in your digital journey and lower dropout rates. This helps ensure that your customer acquisition costs (CAC) remain within a sustainable range for your business enabling you to compete in an increasingly sophisticated landscape.

A good customer identification system will combine ID validation and verification processes with additional checks for potential fraud. Experian’s Identity Authenticate combines all these checks to produce its Authentication Index, a clear-cut indication of the degree of confidence you can have that the claimed identity is both genuine and being used legitimately. This enables you to customise your systems according to your risk appetite.

It’s not enough to be certain that you’re dealing with the genuine holder of an identity. You also need to verify whether potential clients appear on PEPs and sanction lists. With time being of the essence during onboarding, it’s also vital that these checks are conducted in real-time, thereby reducing friction for good customers while catching those on government watch lists. Experian has a comprehensive set of solutions to help with all this and can even screen beneficial owners in B2B transactions.

The best time to check bank account details is during the application process. This prevents banking errors and potential fraud from the outset. As with identity, it’s important to ensure that the details entered are valid and that they belong to the customer. Experian’s Bank Wizard solutions are a solid bet in this area and can return results manually as required or automatically in real-time.

Once you’ve identified the systems you need to prove a customer’s identity, it’s helpful to have a single platform, like Experian’s CrossCore, to bring them all together. As well as offering a joined-up interface, platforms like these often include additional tools that can help you refine and improve your risk strategies to meet future challenges.

Biometrics are becoming increasingly popular as a means of protecting online accounts. Incorporating biometric options, such as fingerprint, facial or voice recognition, into your verification systems minimises the risk of identity fraud and provides customers with a simple way to prove their identity. It also increases their faith in your security measures, a growing concern among today’s consumers.

Confirming someone’s identity doesn’t need to be a painful or slow process. Experian’s Prove-ID, for instance, can validate a customer’s ID by searching over a billion records in real-time. It works for both UK and international customers and can be integrated into your existing online systems to minimise IT time and costs.

A simple way to enhance ID verification is by using security questions that can only be answered by the identity’s owner. Modern iterations of this solution go beyond preselected questions and answers and instead pose queries based on current and historical data in a way that’s understandable to the customer. This type of security check, which is included in Experian’s Identity IQ, is automated, works in real-time and can be integrated into your system. 

One of the biggest hurdles in any application process comes when asking for photographic and documentary proof of identity. Help customers prove who they are in real-time by integrating digital document checks into your onboarding process. Experian’s solution in this area, Document Verification, enables customers to upload images of paper documentation captured by their mobile device or PC camera, which is then validated against the original. Document Verification can also use a selfie image to verify that the photo ID is being uploaded by the owner of the document.

No two customers are the same, which is why you need to treat each case individually. Thanks to data-sharing services like Open Banking, it’s possible to build a detailed view of each customer’s income and expenditure and set an appropriate level of risk based on their personal circumstances.

A customer’s current incomings and outgoings form only part of their overall financial health. Credit bureaus and lenders are increasingly sharing wider insights into consumer behaviour, which can provide you with a more accurate view of your customers’ finances. A tool like Experian’s Delphi for New Business Scorecard pulls this information into your automated processes so that you can offer customers fast decisions with complete peace of mind.

The simplest and most efficient way to gain access to the extra information you need is through your customer. Integrating a service like Experian’s Affordability Passport into your applications process gives your customers the tools to easily verify their identity and provide proof of income and spend. Armed with this insight, you’ll be better placed to offer appropriate products and services that balance your customer’s needs with your business’s appetite for risk.

How’s your customer’s financial health? To make confident decisions you need tools that bring together all available information on a customer’s finances rather than one that simply verifies their current income. Experian’s Affordability IQ, for example, can reveal useful information such as a customer’s current debt-to-income ratio, effective disposable income and other financial health indicators that could indicate potential debt stress.

As the digitally conscious generation comes of age, a slick customer journey is essential. That means automated credit decisions 24 hours a day with minimal manual intervention. But in addition to speed, today’s customers also expect their data to be collected and stored responsibly. Experian’s PowerCurve Customer Acquisition is an automated 24/7 lending platform that can meet all these needs, with customer data secured on an enterprise-grade system that conforms to the highest standards of security and compliance.

You don’t need to give up control just because decisions are being made automatically. A platform that lets you determine your lending strategy using a wide range of detailed variables is key. Experian’s PowerCurve Customer Acquisition offers a strategy design studio that lets you see how different application-capture and underwriting parameters will affect your business and fine-tune your choices to match your risk appetite. 

A powerful lending platform is nothing without data. Confident acquisition decisions come with the ability to plug in relevant data sources that can enrich information captured from your customer.  By instantly combining credit, fraud and internal data with specialist data-feeds chosen for your business, you can ensure your system has the information it needs to capture the right customers every time.

Business never stops. Choosing a cloud-based API system that can be up and running in weeks helps to minimise lost opportunities. Cloud-based apps also have the advantage that they’re managed by the host company, so there’s no additional burden on your IT team. Business growth is another important consideration. Experian’s PowerCurve Customer Acquisition, for instance, can be scaled as required, so there’s never any slowdown in service or bloated bills for smaller operations.