Historically, companies have had to delicately balance fraud detection — the ability to identify fraudulent consumers — and providing a seamless user experience. Time-consuming, complex onboarding processes have caused companies to lose customers who abandon the process before fully creating their account.
Account abandonment is a bigger problem than many realize. In fact, conversation rates for account openings — the rate that consumers actually complete the onboarding process — lie between 60%-70% for most organizations. That means that between 30%-40% of customers are lost before an account is even created.
With that in mind, Jumio’s VP of Global Marketing, Dean Nicolls, recently presented an on-demand webinar discussing 10 tips to dramatically reduce friction during account onboarding.
Striving for “Identity Verification Nirvana”
Balancing a frictionless consumer experience with advanced fraud prevention techniques has long been a struggle for businesses in many verticals. For example, some banks have required customers to come into a branch office instead of opening an account online. This in-person interaction will decrease the number of bad actors in those ecosystems, but it’s a poor user experience overall.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are automated verification solutions online that minimize friction in the onboarding experience, but offer much lower levels of identity assurance and accuracy. It’s long been considered a trade-off because companies have been forced to sacrifice security for seamless onboarding or vice versa.
This no longer needs to be the case. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and biometrics, it is possible to offer onboarding processes that offer both high levels of identity assurance and great user experiences. Nicolls referred to this ideal scenario, in which neither has to be sacrificed, as “identity verification nirvana.” The closer a company gets to this “nirvana,” the higher conversion rates will be.
Identity Verification is at the Heart of Account Enrollment
Streamlining identity verification enables companies to reach new demographics and onboard more customers than ever before. Statistics from a Signicat study show that the longer it takes to onboard someone, the higher abandonment rates are. This is causing European financial institutions to lose nearly 40% of consumers during digital onboarding, highlighting a clear need for improvement in the process.
There is an increasingly trusted method being used to effectively strike this balance: leveraging a government-issued ID and pairing it with a corroborating selfie. If well-implemented, this option delivers a high level of identity assurance and an easy-to-navigate user experience.
Identity Verification Best Practices During Account Creation
There are a number of best practices when it comes to leveraging biometrics with a government-issued ID to improve onboarding. Global coverage features like offering solutions in multiple languages, accepting ID cards from various countries, and leveraging auto ID capture that automatically takes photographs of IDs in a capture window are just a few ways to make onboarding more seamless.
Offering clear rejection reasoning and corrections is another. For example, explaining to a consumer that their government ID was rejected because of a specific, easy-to-fix error — perhaps their screen was blurry or their finger got in the way of the camera — lets them course correct and proceed instead of abandoning the onboarding process.
How well a company onboards good customers, spots legitimate fraud and manages environmental factors (like the previously mentioned blurry photograph) all contribute to the accuracy measurement of its onboarding process. Using best practices and following certain tips can dramatically improve a company’s “onboarding scorecard.”
Learn More about Improving Account Onboarding
This is just a small sampling among several best practices that companies should be adopting to improve account onboarding, reduce account abandonment, and effectively identify and stop fraud in its tracks.
To learn about more tips and tools that can be applied to digital account onboarding, and why identity verification is key, click here to access Jumio’s webinar, “10 Tips to Dramatically Reduce Friction During Account Onboarding.”
