‘Onboarding customers digitally key to unlocking fintech growth’

Fintech | Image: Forbes

By Benjamin Alade
FinTech operators in Nigeria have been charged to digitise their Know Your Customer (KYC) and customer onboarding processes in order to drive scale and unlock the potential of the sub-sector.

   
This was the summary of discussions at the quarterly webinar series of VerifyMe Nigeria, titled, ‘Digital Identity Matters 3.0’, where tech and financial industry experts discussed the theme, “How seamless customer onboarding is transforming fintech growth.”
 
Panelists included: Co-founder/CEO, VerifyMe Nigeria, Esigie Aguele; Managing Director, Branch International, Dayo Ademola and Founder/CEO, Kuda Bank, Babs Ogundeyi.

According to Aguele, an efficient onboarding process must include a KYC infrastructure that allows the organisation to focus on its core business while ensuring seamless onboarding of customers.
 
He added that rather than see the process as a chore, FinTechs should consider onboarding as the first opportunity to unlock growth by collating as much data about a customer from different sources. 
 
He said: “One of the exciting advantages of identity tech in the state of play of the Nigerian FinTech sector is that we are able to leverage access to national data points across board for instant customer onboarding.
 
With a population of 200 million, about 50 million Nigerians have the Bank Verification Number (BVN), which is the ID for the banking sector, 65 million have a National Identity Number and just fewer than 10 million have Driver’s License. So, it’s about using these identities to onboard customers where available and plugging into ecosystems that take away the headache of onboarding or knowing who your customer is so that FinTechs can better serve them.”

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Drawing from Branch’s experience in the Nigerian market, Ademola advised operators to deliver a seamless infrastructure that can onboard customers in minutes while eliminating extended gaps during the process.
 
“As a digital lending platform, our approach was to build an algorithm-enabled credit scoring system to assess applicants’ credit worthiness and dispatch loans within minutes to suitable candidates. This ensured that they did not have to leave the digital experience midway through the process as we observed that the majority of customers did not return after they dropped off due to requirements for guarantors’ details, bank statements and the like,” she stated. 
 
Speaking on the role of technology, Ogundeyi said: “Onboarding in KYC requires continuous iteration because there are always criminals trying to circumvent the process. Innovative technology, such as liveness checks, support the onboarding process by ensuring that the person holding the device, which is assumed to be the account opener, is the same image captured in the system because they have to take and upload a selfie in real-time. So, technology keeps the ecosystem alert”.