Transform your customer onboarding experience (Sponsored)

Regulated organisations often undertake labour-intensive and costly customer onboarding processes, which can lead to high drop-out rates. valid8Me aims to revolutionise the experience by condensing months into minutes while boosting security.

Ireland-based technology company, Horizon8, has developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution called valid8Me that takes time, cost, and pain out of the customer onboarding process for companies in the financial sector. It also offers a compliance mechanism for Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Despite only being launched at the beginning of the year, the valid8Me solution has already picked up two prestigious industry awards. Last November, the National Investment Company Service Association (NICSA), the US trade association for investment management firms, awarded valid8Me the 2020 NICSA NOVA award for innovation in product development and marketing. And in February of this year, the company won the first series of the 2021 Fintech Factor competition run by the Irish Funds Industry Association. “The Fintech Factor series allows companies like us to pitch their products,” explains Patrick Horgan, Horizon8’s Managing Director for Ireland. “The Irish Funds Industry Association membership votes for the product, and we came out on the right side of that. That was a great vote of confidence and endorsement for the product and the team. We were up against top fintech firms for the NICSA award, and that was another great moment for the team.”

Horgan joined the company at the beginning of 2019 with the broad remit of setting up the European operation headquartered out of Cork, building the team, and growing the business. Before that, Horizon8 was a technology services company with its roots in a StateStreet joint venture.

“When we set up Horizon8 Ireland, a big part of the strategy was to look for opportunities to create our own intellectual property (IP), take our own products to market, and solve some big challenges for businesses with a product they need and love,” says Horgan. “That would be a very different business model, but the question was: what to build.”

The answer came from the firm’s technology services work. “We were asked to tender for two separate KYC document-sharing solutions. One project was based in Luxembourg with a consortium of large financial institutions. The other was based in Paris for a consortium of large French and German financial institutions. That gave us great insights into the problem, which built on the existing knowledge obtained first-hand over the years from the directors and management team who have extensive experience in the funds and asset management industry.” Those consortia initiatives were slow to progress and get off the ground, but the seed of the idea was planted. 
The problem was the repetitive, labour-intensive, costly, and highly inefficient customer onboarding process for financial institutions and other regulated organisations. Customers have to prove their identities and supply a range of documentation and proof. “Average customer onboarding times can often exceed one month, with document sourcing for identity verification typically accounting for more than 50% of that journey,” Horgan notes. “As consumers, most of us have experienced the pain of being onboarded as a customer where we needed to prove our identity and share sensitive information like passports or driving licenses, proof of address, or the source of funds. It can be a frustrating experience and can lead to high drop-off rates.”

Having identified the problem, Horizon8 set about solving it. “We commenced with a typical product development approach by putting storyboards and mock-ups of the product in front of businesses across several industry verticals, starting with the sectors that bring more complexity, such as funds and asset management, banking, accounting, and advisory services,” he continues. “We then built a prototype and put it in front of several firms of all sizes across a number of industry verticals, going through the typical feedback loop.” The result was valid8Me. “The product was created for both businesses and consumers to transform the customer onboarding and ongoing customer due diligence activities. It gets to the heart of the document-sourcing KYC challenge for regulated businesses that need to comply with AML regulations across multiple industries.”

The vision is for valid8Me to provide a more secure and convenient way for consumers to prove their identity and to reduce financial crime through the application of advanced biometric document forensic checks. “We see valid8Me becoming a de facto standard for digital identity and solving the KYC and customer due diligence challenge for all businesses and consumers.”

valid8Me works by providing each individual and corporate customer with their own digital identity vault, which can be downloaded from the Apple App & Google Play stores. The vault is held securely in the cloud on their behalf by Horizon8. All documents required for onboarding are held in the vault, and the customer simply gives the bank or financial institution permission to access their vault to facilitate the onboarding process. The digital vault allows customers to control how they store, share, trace, and manage their documents and data.

“The secure digital vault allows customers to explicitly grant access to their data with those companies with which they want to do business. It advocates data privacy principles by design by allowing customers to consent to share the minimum amount of data required for a particular product or service. That’s getting to the heart and spirit of regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA (the California Consumer Privacy Act) in the US.”

The benefits are far-reaching. “It takes upwards of two weeks for a bank to source customer documentation. Our solution reduces that to minutes. And it takes care of ongoing due diligence. We are getting excellent customer feedback about cost reductions with savings of between 40-50% reported. It also reduces GDPR and other data compliance risk.”

The benefits for corporate customers are also impressive. “It allows them to store their key information in a digital vault and model their corporate structure, for example, their ultimate beneficial owner structure, accounting for all their directors and authorised representatives as well. Directors may sit on the boards of multiple companies, and they can have one digital vault that can be mapped to all the legal entities and businesses they work with.”

The solution has been very well received in Ireland, and Horizon8 has targeted expansion into the UK in the third quarter of this year, with the US to follow. “We are getting excellent traction among the accounting community in Ireland. Since launching at the beginning of 2021, we have been focused on Ireland, and the reaction has been great. Grant Thornton and Mazars are hugely excited to be early adopters of valid8Me. We are rolling it out to several Irish law firms as well at the moment.” The UK is next. “There are 45,000 accountancy and law practices in the UK, and we are planning to move into that market in Q3. We are also doing market entry preparations in the US. All the states have their own regulations, with the highest bar set in California, Virginia, Illinois, Washington and a few other states. We will meet those standards to enable the product to be sold in every state.”

Looking beyond that, Horgan points to the unique scalability of valid8Me. “It’s a universal SaaS platform, and that means there is a price point and a licence to suit companies of any size. Whether it’s an accounting firm with ten people or a Grant Thornton with 140 locations around the world, it’s cost-competitive at every level.”

For more information, visit www.valid8me.com/webinars/

This article is sponsored by valid8me.