Our client is a multinational banking and financial services company with branches worldwide. It offers a variety of banking services to individuals, business entities and large institutions.
The Challenge
Lengthy onboarding process
A decade ago, our client collaborated with a fintech company to offer mobile-first financial services to consumers all across Asia. This partnership included $500M in financing to help the fintech grow its local marketplace of businesses and customers.
However, both the client and the fintech needed help optimizing the cumbersome process of onboarding customers due to mandatory checks and the absence of crucial information.
- The absence of savings or a rich credit history was a challenge to onboarding younger age-group customers
- Absence of automation for performing validations/verifications during BNPL (buy now, pay later) customer onboarding
- The absence of a unique customer ID in the customer validation API led to inaccurate results for existing customer checks
- AML (anti-money laundering), PEP (politically exposed person) and GNS (Global Name Screening) checks are mandatory and need to be done before customer onboarding
The Objective
Grow market presence through improved customer experience and faster onboarding
Our client’s business objective was to scale up its presence in the mass market segment by onboarding an additional one million customers by 2025 and acting as a lender, with the delivery of $60M in cumulative 5-year revenue and $30-40M via BNPL.
In order to meet this objective, they knew they had to improve the customer onboarding experience and achieve a better turnaround time for BNPL business. Together we identified multiple opportunities and enhancements throughout their onboarding process.
The Solution
Implementation of critical APIs
HCLTech assisted the client in developing the following key features:
- A GNS API was developed to verify customer data and screen for AML, PEP and fraud
- A KYC API was developed to obtain the customer's data from SINGPASS (Singapore Personal Access)
- Improved the accuracy of performing existing customer checks by including NRIC (a unique ID for citizens) in the existing downstream API that was used for performing validation
The solution entailed implementing critical APIs so that users could access and purchase loan products through the client’s mobile and web-enabled BNPL application.
The functional flow of an application:
- The user (customer/prospect) logs into the loan application from a mobile and web-enabled BNPL application
- The user can view and purchase the products available on the onboarding platform
- To provide the BNPL facility, several checks need to be performed by the bank, like dedupe, credit assessments, fraud checks, negative list checks, loan management and collection triggers.
To enable the above, the bank implemented two critical APIs as part of the solution. The core purpose of the API was to perform dedupe and KYC checks:
- Comprising of deduplication check using internal downstream APIs — this returns the response as ‘New to Bank’ or ‘Existing to Bank’
- ‘Name Screening’ check using GNS API — this was performed using Dow Jones Data for onboarding and repeated periodically for existing customers
- The encryption/decryption is handled using the CAAS (Container as Service) API
Once the API returns the response for customer verification, if it’s an existing customer, then the application is rejected, and an error message pops up on the screen stating that the “customer already exists.”
If a new customer logs in to the bank, name screening (like credit assessments, fraud checks and negative list checks) is performed. Based on the response, the application will be approved, and the customer can purchase products, make the initial payment and convert the remaining amount into three EMIs, which will be part of loan management.
Loan closure requests can be made at any time. During the loan period, payments can be made in EMIs via the ECS (Electronic Clearing System). Customers will be notified when the EMI is due. HCLTech carried out this as part of the collection triggers.
Infrastructure: As part of the program, the application was migrated from OCP (Open Shift Container Platform) to AWS.
The Impact
Enhanced customer experience, improved accuracy and reduced onboarding time
- The onboarding time has been reduced, improving the customer experience and helping the bank meet its business objectives
- APIs have helped to reduce the onboarding time and further improve the accuracy of the customer onboarding process
- Applications successfully migrated from OCP to AWS, resulting in increased security and transparency, improved performance and cost savings for the bank
