E-KYC: The Future of Onboarding in the Stock Trading Industry

Head of Retail Broking, BOB Capital

 

Digital inclusivity is the future; it is the new norm, the new reality. As technology embeds itself in every corner of the current era, the digital movement will only be fruitful when it yields digital inclusion across all sectors. When the financial sector, which includes the stock trading industry, manoeuvres its processes into the digital landscape, it can take a significant step toward enhancing customer and channel partner engagement.

 

The stock trading sector forms an intricate network of channel partners and customers whose induction into the industry is through onboarding. For decades, onboarding has been handled by know-your-customer (KYC) processes to verify the stakeholder’s identity before facilitating transitions. However, in an age of digitalisation, e-KYC has taken over conventional KYC documentation via customer onboarding chatbot automation for safer and accelerated operations and efficient customer experiences.

Traditional Onboarding: A Tale of Inefficiency and Slow Growth 

As technology advances, trends change and adapt to deliver seamless and uninterrupted customer experience, which traditional onboarding processes don’t offer. Their manual-dependent nature makes onboarding time-consuming and complex, delaying the customer’s first transaction. 89% of customers reported unpleasant KYC experiences, affecting the relationship of 13% of customers with their financial institution.

 

“e-KYC is invariably imbued with the needs of today’s customers—seamless experiences, instant communication, and high engagement. E-KYC is the bridge that mends the waiting period before customers’ and channel partners’ first transactions.” 

 

Paired with frequent downtimes and poor onboarding turnaround times, traditional KYC documentation sets the digital movement back, hindering customer and channel partner engagement. Fortunately, imbibed by technological innovation, e-KYC introduces an efficient alternative.

E-KYC Automation Chatbots: Transforming the Financial Landscape

Manual processes lack the speed and metrics to retain customer engagement. 81% of C-suite bank executives cited collecting and managing large volumes of client data as primary factors affecting customer experience during onboarding. When coupled with technological advancements like automation chatbots, e-KYC opens the window to new opportunities to improve customer experiences, strengthen the foundation for financial inclusivity, and maintain channel partner relationships.

 

Digital KYC uses a host of technologies, Intelligent Process Automation (IPA), that work in tandem to merge, process, and automate digital operations. IPA not only boosts performance but also positively affects expenditure—using IPA to automate onboarding and identity verification reduces compliance costs by 70%.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotics are the future of digitalisation. Instead of replacing manual tasks, robots replicate human patterns to manage manually intensive, complex, and repetitive operations.

 

• Processing Customer Information: RPA automatically scans customer documents to extract relevant data and transfers it into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, saving time and resources and minimising the error margin.

 

• Document Verification: Whether structured or unstructured, RPA verifies customer data by scouring across multiple databases and sources, collecting information, scanning social media platforms, and integrating data from various sources and entering them into the database to check their validity.

 

• Collecting Customer Credit Score: Once finalising and authenticating the onboarding process, RPA checks customers’ credits, financial records, and information on their business activities to categorise them as structured and unstructured documents.

 

• Screening Channel Partners and Customers: KYC has revolutionised the stock trading industry by making customer screening against public and private records easier to gather orderly documents. Using robots, e-KYC digitally checks customers’ data spanning multiple platforms.

 

• Faster Response Time: Quick responses lay the groundwork for excellent customer and channel partner engagement; RPA powers through with quicker and more accurate solutions to customer requests by navigating large datasets and using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to recognise customer patterns and provide effective solutions.

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

Intelligent Document Processing accumulates technologies like ML, AI, Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to collect and analyse data from large volumes of datasets and documents.

 

• Streamlining Onboarding: E-KYC uses IDP to facilitate verification by seamlessly executing One-Time Password (OP) and ID processes. Furthermore, IDP enables comprehensive data scanning for thorough verification, saving time and effort.

 

• Faster Customer Onboarding: Using IDP, e-KYC accelerates the data extraction and scanning processes across multiple documents. In addition to quicker methods, automated chatbots ensure the data obtained is accurate and can be combined with other API systems to automatically verify its authenticity against reliable resources, significantly improving the onboarding experience.

 

• Reduced Risk Rates: Cyber risks, operational risks, and financial risks are the top three concerns of executives across banks, with 45% of respondents claiming financial crime risks as an investment priority. Using blockchain and AI, e-KYC automatically collects sensitive and relevant data on time from multiple documents, reducing manual mistakes and ensuring that only fact- and cross-checked data is being used to evaluate risk levels.

 

As the world marches toward digitalisation, e-KYC ensures financial inclusion and improved customer and channel partner engagement through automation chatbots. Chatbots use technologies like AI, ML, and NLP to build Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Document Processing systems to make the onboarding process user-friendly, centring the entire experience around customer and channel partner engagement and accessibility.

 

The Journey into Industry

 

With over 17 years of experience in the technological landscape, Sunil Gangawat has turned the tide of retail businesses. Adept at system performances and market updates, he has transformed online broking, acquisitions and activation, product strategies, process designs and implementation, and marketing campaigns. As the Head of Retail Broking at BFSI Consulting, Sunil is a visionary with the knowledge and expertise to reform the financial sector. His extensive experience across the financial domain, M.Sc. in Maths, and MBA in Finance are the marks of authentic and esteemed leadership. Sunil's leadership prowess has equipped the technological sphere with phenomenal project and risk management, customer experience, business development, and distribution and people management skills.