1 Introduction
Organizations are under increasing pressure to provide a full, seamless and modern digital experience to customers in response to direct market demands for faster, mobile-based services as well as demands from business leaders to cut costs, improve efficiency, increase productivity and gain or maintain a competitive edge by meeting the expectations of existing and prospective customers.
These are the primary drivers of digital transformation projects that are taking place in just about every industry sector, particularly the financial services industry where legacy banking institutions are being forced to redefine themselves to remain competitive as new market entrants increase their legitimacy and value by embracing fintech solutions capable of meeting market expectations and avoiding cumbersome, time-consuming onboarding, authentication, signing and verification processes.
Delivering a full digital experience is key to business success in the digital era, but requires adequate technology to support processes such as the onboarding of customers, recurring authentication and secure customer interactions and transactions.
The challenge facing many organizations in all sectors seeking to become fully digital is extending the current customer experience in a manner that works smoothly with existing legacy applications, but also supports the new digital services and is compliant the ever-growing list of regulations.
In addition, customers expect a consistent experience across all types of services from an organization, and in this context, digital identities become the key to success in attracting and retaining customers. With direct relationships with the customers, businesses remain in control of the business. Such relationships in a digital world, however, are tightly bound to maintaining digital identities. Managing digital, electronic identities in all types of customer interactions, therefore, must be solved comprehensively to keep the business relationships with the customers and to succeed in business.
Finding the correct balance between security and compliance, and customer experience is important for all businesses in the face of a continually growing number of regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework, the Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework, and the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Finding this balance is especially challenging for the financial sector because of increased cyber risk and regulatory requirements. KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti Money Laundering), and the EU PSD2 (Revised Payment Services Directive) with its impact on SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) have a strong influence on the way customer interactions can be implemented today. These regulations:
- Define when and how documents must be signed;
- Define the authorization of transactions;
- Define which approaches for onboarding customers are accepted;
- Set the rules for various transactions.
Fortunately, technology is increasingly becoming available that can help meet the key challenges in supporting the digital customer experience and the journey from consumer to regular customer such as video identification as part of regulated KYC (Know Your Customer) processes, and Adaptive Authentication, including the flexible support of different authenticators, for example.
For financial services companies – and other businesses in heavily regulated industries that have a variety of requirements around digital identities and trust – we recommend that before purchasing any point solutions, they first consider the option of using a central or core platform for the digital identity services and related capabilities. Such a platform can be extended by capabilities in some areas, when required – but represents a central, integrated approach.
In the context of the financial services and similar industries, a comprehensive solution for supporting the digital customer experience requires support for three distinct yet tightly related areas:
- Electronic Identity Management, for enabling access to services with electronic/digital identities, delivering flexibility for the customer, while meeting regulatory requirements.
- Customer Onboarding and KYC/AML compliance, for supporting efficient and smooth onboarding processes, while meeting the ever-increasing regulatory requirements around KYC and AML (Anti Money Laundering).
- Electronic Trust Services, which support businesses in secure interactions and transactions, from document signing to transaction security, relying on the digital identities of the customers and associated secrets whenever required.
These services are closely related: Onboarding establishes the digital identity that is used from there on, or which allows adding further identities and authenticators on behalf of the user. It also provides the foundation for using such identities in subsequent processes, and it links the identities with further proof such as mobile phone numbers that are used in verification processes.
We believe it will help businesses that need these tightly related services to have a central solution that serves all key requirements and integrating with highly specialized capabilities such as video identification helps businesses. It is much easier to build on a central solution for digital identities and the digital customer experience than integrating a broad range of different vendor’s capabilities.
Oxyliom, which is headquartered in Morocco and has offices in Luxembourg and Dubai, is one of the few vendors offering a comprehensive platform to support the digital trust and consumer identity services required for a modern, secure and regulatory-compliant digital customer experience.
Since starting as a system integrator in 2012, the company has developed the GAÏA Trust Platform which provides two solutions: GAÏA Advanced Identity Management and GAÏA Trust Services Management for securing electronic transactions.
