Customer onboarding checklist for Identity Verification

Verifying the identity of a new customer during the onboarding process is vital.

Not only is proper identity verification a key tenet of how you’ll fulfill your commitments to Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations: it’s also an important part of your customer’s journey with your business and brand.

But that’s not to say identity verification during the onboarding process is without its challenges – because there are so many things that can put a new customer off.

Long forms to fill out. Too much information required. Complex, confusing flows. These all place a burden of time, effort, and cognition on your customer: friction which, if not managed, can lead to your customers first disengaging from – then outright abandoning – the process.

The solution? An identity verification process that strikes the perfect balance: providing a slick, seamless user experience (UX) for the customer you’re onboarding, while giving your business everything it needs to tick all the relevant financial, legal, and regulatory boxes.

To help, we’ve put together a customer onboarding checklist for your business. From pre-onboarding preparation to post-onboarding support, below you’ll find everything you need to build a robust, reliable process to bring new customers into the fold: allowing you to verify their identity quickly and securely – without friction, fuss, or frustration.

User consent and legal agreements

If you want to verify your customers – through a robust range of different document-based and biometric authentication methods, there’s some small print: namely, your business’s terms and conditions. You’ll need the customer’s explicit consent to these – and to your privacy policy – before being able to enter into an agreement with them for financial products and services.

Why? Because, as we explored earlier, access to – and use of – customer data is heavily regulated. (Especially in Europe, and of course in California.) And, since your business needs that data to be able to run the requisite KYC and AML compliance checks, you’re mandated to make sure the customer is happy with their information being used for these purposes.

Fortunately, Checkout.com’s Identity Verification solution can help you handle this process as part of its suite of features: ensuring you’re requesting the right consent, from the right customers, for the right things – and making sure you stay compliant with the right regulation.

Pre-onboarding preparation

The first step in a comprehensive customer onboarding process comes even before the customer gets involved. We’re talking about pre-onboarding preparation: and here, understanding your business’s regulatory requirements is vital.

What these regulatory responsibilities will be, exactly, depends on geography (where your business operates) and the industry you’re in (some sectors, such as gambling and real estate, are considered ‘high-risk’). These regulations include:

• KYC (Know Your Customer), which requires you to identify clients and verify them through their authentic identity documents to assess their risk profile. An integral part of the customer due diligence (CDD) process, KYC checks are predominantly for financial services firms – such as banks, credit unions, and investment/trading companies – responsible for issuing accounts and cards, and extending credit. KYC checks are also a steadfast way to mitigate the impact of identity theft on your reputation and brand.
• AML (Anti-Money Laundering), which requires the ongoing monitoring of your customers’ transactions to watch for (and report) suspicious financial activity that could be linked to terrorism financing or money laundering. It’s mainly for businesses in high-risk industries, where large sums of money are changing hands.

You’ll also need to be familiar with location-specific regulations. These include:

• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): European Union law requires companies to obtain explicit customer consent to collect and handle their data. If you do business in the EU – even if you’re based on the opposite side of the world to Europe – you’ll still need to be GDPR-compliant.
• eIDAS (Electronic Identification, Authentication, and Trust Services in Europe
• Financial Action Task Force (FATF): headquartered in Paris, but applicable worldwide
• European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in Europe
• CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) in California
• BSA (Bank Secrecy Act) in the US
• FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) in the US

These regulations are only one part of the pre-onboarding preparation, though.

The other? Investing in the technological infrastructure to be able to meet these regulations: namely, by verifying your customers’ identity in a compliant and cost-effective way.

One readymade solution here is Checkout.com’s Identity Verification product.

With us, you can customize your onboarding solution’s KYC checks based on your region’s specific AML requirements: and, in doing so, rest assured that you’re meeting a plethora of global and recognized standards. (The aforementioned FATF, ETSI, and GDPR included.)

What’s more, we’ll equip you with a range of ways to authenticate your customers – including customizable video flows with AI-powered prompts – plus the ability to combine human and automated reviews to minimize false positives. (And maximize accuracy.)

We are partnering with Comply Advantage, the financial industry's leading source of AI-driven financial crime risk data. This partnership allows you with only one integration to:

• Screen and monitor customers in real-time against a high-quality global database of Sanctions, PEPs, Watchlists, Adverse Media & more.
• Tailor your AML screening & monitoring process to the unique needs of your business and your risk-based approach.
• Unlock compliance as a business advantage: reduce false positives by up to 70% and decrease onboarding cycle time by up to 50%.

User-friendly interface design

We touched, earlier, on the delicate balance of identity verification. And on how difficult it can be to walk the tightrope between collecting enough information to satisfy your KYC requirements, but not too much that it disengages your customer, or dissuades them from completing the onboarding process.

To this end, a user-friendly interface is absolutely crucial.

So, make it as simple as possible for customers to upload their documents, walk them through each stage of the journey with helpful prompts, and ensure the flow looks good and is highly useable on all devices – including, and especially, mobile.

Speed is key here, too. It’s important your identity verification solution is able to handle the onboarding flow quickly so, if any further follow-up or information is required from your customer, you can let them know immediately – rather than leaving them in the dark.

Finally, you’ll want to make sure you can configure the style and setup of the solution so that it looks – and feels – like it belongs to your business.

Redirecting a user to a platform that looks generic or divorced from your brand’s identity weakens trust at a stage of the process in which trust is more crucial than ever – so don’t skimp on the details. To start with, this means adding your business’s colors, and logo. But you can also consider – and this is possible with Checkout.com’s Identity Verification solutions – personalizing the instructions to further boost trust with the customer you’re onboarding. This feature is available in 16 languages.

Initial contact and information gathering

With your identity verification tool’s UX downpat and a sound understanding of the relevant regulations, it’s time to begin the customer onboarding process with a warm welcome: or, more accurately, a warm welcome screen.

The onboarding journey should begin with a welcome screen that lays out the key details of what’s to come: explaining what the process will look like, what’ll be required from the customer, and how long they can expect it to take.

At this juncture, you’ll also need to gather, via secure forms, the requisite personal data from the customer. While this will vary depending on the nature of your business, your industry, and the type of product or service you’re providing, it should include, as a minimum, the customer’s:

• Name
• Date of birth
• Email address
• Phone number

Identity verification through live streaming video

Traditionally, identity verification was a long, sprawling process.

It was a process in which your customer would’ve had to send you physical, certified copies of their documents (or even the real thing), and that could’ve involved whole teams of anti-fraud and anti-counterfeit experts sharing their thoughts.

Now, it’s much more simple. If, that is, you have the right tools at your disposal.

One such tool? Live streaming video.

Through this – a feature Checkout.com’s Identity Verification solutions offers – you can enable your customer to verify their documents by recording a live video of said documents.

Rather than simply sending a picture (a method which lends itself to counterfeiting, and thus plays into the hands of document fraudsters), Checkout.com’s solution instead lets you ask your customer to film – in real time – the front and back of their identity document.

Then, the AI underpinning our identity verification solutions uses the footage to analyze movement and tilting. Then, it checks the various visual and holographic elements – against a growing library of state-issued documents – for any sign of forgery.

Video’s verification applications aren’t limited only to documents, though. The medium also works in tandem with facial recognition technology to match the customer’s face with the photo on their passport or national ID card. Moreover, liveness detection – another feature supported by Checkout.com’s Identity Verification solution – ensures that your customer is physically present during the live session, preventing the use of photos or videos. Additionally, fraudsters often employ advanced techniques, such as AI to create deepfakes, but our security features are designed to detect these as well. We stay ahead of the most innovative fraud techniques, providing you with robust protection

Want to better understand identity fraud – and use that knowledge to safeguard your business from a pool of ever-smarter, ever-expanding online threats? Read more.

Document verification

The ability to accurately verify customer government issued ID documents is the crux of all customer onboarding processes – especially if you provide financial, or high-risk, products and services.

These customer documents include:

• Passport
• National ID card
• Driver’s license
• Visas
• Residence permits

Again, identity verification techniques have come a long way since the days where you’d physically have to examine a document – and, as your business grows, you don’t want to get hung up on the manual effort of verifying thousands of customer driver’s licenses.

The answer? Automation. (At least, up to a point). The most scalable identity verification solutions allow you to automate your customer authentication processes: cutting costs, streamlining onboarding, and freeing up your team to address other operational weaknesses.

Checkout.com’s Identity Verification solution, for example, automates document reviews – while still flagging some cases for human review in instances where a certain risk threshold has been met, or where uncertainty exists. This allows you to proceed confidently with the onboarding process: knowing that anything missed by the pace and productivity of AI has been picked up by a human’s expert eye.

Additional security measures

Just as AI is most effective when it’s supported by a team of human technicians, document verification is best deployed with a range of additional security measures behind it.

And one such measure is a method that anyone who’s ever unlocked an iPhone, or gained access to a high-tech office building, will be familiar with: biometric verification.

Biometric verification involves using a customer’s inherent qualities – that is, aspects of their physical and biological makeup – to ensure they are who they say they are.

It includes:

• leveraging biometric data to enhance the doc-face match
• delivering strong  biometric re-authentication, on the go, following the initial onbaording

Checks involving biometric verification provide that extra layer of security so integral to remote the customer onboarding journey: whether you’re inviting someone to sign a document, complete a hiring process, apply for financial services, or finish setting up their gaming or marketplace seller account.

Biometric verification is also handy in high-risk – and higher-profile – cases, where more rigorous risk assessment and AML checks are necessary. (For instance, when cross-referencing a customer against global sanctions lists, or registers of politically exposed persons.)

We’re collaborating with ComplyAdvantage, the foremost provider of AI-driven financial crime risk data, assisting over 1,600 businesses in more than 100 countries in evaluating and managing risks from individual clients and companies.

Through this partnership, we provide our clients with the expertise and global reach of an industry leader, enabling compliance with a cutting-edge approach.

Final approval and account setup

It sounds anticlimactic, but when the onboarding process reaches the stage of final approval and account setup, there’s not much left to do from an identity verification perspective.

If, for any reason, the IDV is declined, we provide a full list of granular response codes that our customers can use to get back to the users, with specific recommendations to ensure the second try is successful.

Following any late tweaks, you can approve the application and provide the customer with all the details they need to set up their account, create a unique password, and start transacting.

Post-onboarding support

The customer onboarding journey isn’t one with a defined endpoint.

Instead, it’s an ongoing, dynamic dance with your business – which means your duties to that customer don’t end when you approve their account, or when they begin using your services.

Rather, this stage of the onboarding process simply gives way to the next one: providing high-quality, personalized post-onboarding support. That doesn’t mean you have to be overly attentive, of course – or that you have to take a ‘helicopter’ approach to customer support. It can be as simple as sending an email or message informing your customer that you’ve set up their account successfully, and welcoming them to your brand’s community.

This communication could also include:

• Answers to frequently asked questions
• Instructions to help them log in for the first time
• Basic details about their account (such as account number or identifier)
• Quick links to your contact information: such as phone, email address, and social media
• More information about their dedicated customer success manager, if applicable

Maintaining regular contact with your brand’s community will help foster an environment of loyalty, support, familiarity, and engagement: encouraging them to continue using your services, and even recommend your business to their friends, family, and colleagues.

Continuous improvement

Connecting with your community of customers isn’t the only ongoing onboarding task for your checklist. You’ll also need to commit to the continuous betterment of your onboarding process: to tweaking, iterating, and optimizing your approach to meet your users’ needs.

How? Again, it’s by talking to them.

Make requesting feedback a core component of your customer onboarding process: sending out surveys for, running focus groups with, and soliciting honest thoughts from your users.

Doing so will allow you to understand what your onboarding process is doing well, what’s not as efficient, and where any leaks or friction points – that you and your team, being so close to the process, may have missed – might exist. Pair this with keeping a keen eye on technological advancements (there are always fresh, usually AI-fuelled, developments improving our ability to verify people and their documents), and you’ve got a recipe for a robust customer onboarding process. (Or, in other words, one your customers will actually want to use!)

Don’t exclude your KYC checks from this attitude of continuous improvement, either. After all, there are already plenty of ways to optimize KYC conversion – all of which you can try today.

Streamline your customer onboarding and identity verification processes with Checkout.com

Too many businesses see the customer onboarding process – and all its attendant identity verification and anti-fraud checks – as a chore; as a boring, but ultimately necessary, formality.

Why, though? Why, when onboarding is such a ripe opportunity to learn from, engage with, and cater to the specific needs of your newest customers? And when a simple reframing, or rephrasing, of the process transforms it from the onboarding of new users to your platform into the induction of new members into your brand’s thriving, welcoming ecosystem?

In developing our Identity Verification solution, this is exactly the kind of inclusive, intelligent mentality the team here at Checkout.com had in mind.

Because, when your users utilize our software, they won’t feel like a number – they’ll feel like a valued part of your brand’s community.

Personalized video flows walk them through the process. Stress-tested UX – which you’ve customized with your brand’s logo and colors – makes things familiar and friction-free. And AI-prompts, responding in real time, keep them informed as to how the process is unfolding.

As for your business, you can feel safe in the knowledge that our Identity Verification solution is keeping you compliant with KYC, AML, ETSI, and FATF regulations – wherever in the world you do business. Plus, our data suggests you’ll see tangible benefits not only in your onboarding completion rates (as much as 30%), but in your wallet. (By navigating operational inefficiencies, our solution can help your business cut costs by up to 50%.)

Ready to revitalize the way you onboard your customers, and rethink the way you verify their identities and documents? Get in touch with our team of experts here at Checkout.com today to kick off a no-obligation conversation about how we can meet your identity verification needs.