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Financial Inclusion and the Potential of Video KYC

Financial inclusion has always been at the heart of India’s economic policy and with the introduction of Video KYC across sectors, we have come one step closer to achieving this very feat. Video-based remote KYC has paved the way for underbanked and unbanked areas in an attempt to provide equal financial access to all. Financial inclusion makes it easy for SMEs, millennials, professionals, entrepreneurs and others to apply for and receive loans, credit cards, and buy insurance policies, now more than ever, with easy Video KYC verification and completion of tedious procedures in minutes. 

Video KYC is especially key to tier 2 and tier 3 cities where bank branches are far and few, but essential banking services remain more imperative. Kwik.ID is designed to ensure that our Video KYC tool reaches even the farthest of rural areas with provisions for a low bandwidth mode and a guided step-by-step processes; all of which we believe bridge the gap between customers and businesses, all across India.

Since its launch, the potential of Video KYC has been immense, and with the lockdown, the market for Video KYC vendors continues to flourish. So far, people stuck indoors resorted to online payments via different avenues, but what about those who didn’t have a bank account? Going physically to the bank and submitting documents was risky because it involved close contact. Luckily for us, just prior to the lockdown, Video based KYC was introduced and adopted by different sectors for opening bank accounts, demat accounts, Forex, online wallets and more, which made business much smoother for many.

In the most recent circular issued by the IRDAI, the regulatory board also permits Video KYC for insurance companies, which proves to be a game-changing move for the sector that for so long, suffered from the lack of customers during the lockdown.

With the introduction of Video KYC for Banks and Aadhar-based KYC, lenders now have access to customer data, with their consent. As per RBI guidelines, banks need to update the KYC details periodically to maintain a record of their account holders. In addition to Video KYC processes carried out while opening an account, account holders are requested to go through a re-KYC and submit the necessary documents, albeit online.

Video KYC proves to be a boon for fin-tech companies too, because owing to the limited manual KYC centers, very few customers thought of tech finance as a viable option, as the process wasn’t streamlined online. There was a 40% drop in manual KYC as compared to digital KYC. Being entirely online, features like OCR, Facematch, Liveliness detection, Geo-tagging are of great use to fintech companies, especially start-ups who want to minimize cost. These features validate the evidence and also rectify inconsistent data, thereby eliminating discrepancies and saving time.

Slowly and steadily, Video KYC has seeped into every sector and every industry, be it finance or otherwise. Digital KYC hasn’t just digitized the process, but accelerated it, as well. The entire process from application to disbursal that would once take up to 10 days, now takes barely a few hours.

India’s powerful digital ecosystem coupled with the potential Video KYC can unleash, are key to the country’s economic progress by driving financial inclusion.

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Call Queues and Scheduling Made Easy With Kwik.ID

At Kwik.ID, we understand the importance of good customer service, so apart from striving to be the best Video KYC solution providers in the industry, we also strive to make the Digital KYC tools smooth and quick-paced. From handheld processes, AI-powered Facematch and Liveliness, to Video KYC at low bandwidth, we offer it all. Among the array of features are our call queue and scheduling feature, which promises 100% efficiency and customer satisfaction.

To onboard Digital KYC customers seamlessly, it is imperative to monitor these call queues consistently and lower the average call queue time to as low as 1 minute. This results in new sales opportunities, goodwill, and encourages brand awareness.

Here’s why queue call management matters if you want to achieve an above 85% completion rate from your video KYC verification:

Low Call Abandonment Rates: The longer your potential customer is kept waiting, the higher the chances of him dropping off from your business entirely and choosing a competitor. Moreover, by reducing call abandonment rates, your business can handle a higher volume of calls.

2. High First-Call Rates: Attending to a customer on the first call indicates that your business is a good service provider.

3. Minimised Costs: When you schedule a digital KYC session call with a potential customer, you reduce the hold time to free up the toll-free lines and receive more calls.

Sometimes, these rates tend to be low and costs aren’t minimised enough, leading to your Video KYC verification tool not working effectively enough. This can happen because of the following reasons:

1. Outdated Technology: One of our top priorities at Kwik.ID is to make our Video KYC tools compatible with every Android and iOS device, while offering Video KYC at low bandwidth. While outdated technology is definitely something that can lead to call drops even after queueing and scheduling, we promise a smooth process by offering comprehensive customer information before agents answer the call.

2. Under-staffing: Inspite of offering a host of features, even the best video KYC tool is nothing without enough agents who’ll handle the calls. Your calls might keep piling up and there’d be nobody around to respond to them.

3. Long Handling Times: A call attended to might take longer than expected because the agent isn’t cooperating with the caller or interrupting the caller.

With Kwik.ID’s video KYC verification, rest assured these problems won’t come into play with our carefully segmented call queues and scheduling, to maximise your success rate to over 85%. Our process begins by segregating the queues into two – standard queue and priority queue. Every potential customer is first put into the standard queue by default before they are assigned an agent. Based on the age, if the customer is a senior citizen, and/or based on location if a customer belongs to a rural area, he is placed in the priority queue. Also, in case a customer’s call is disconnected by an agent once or an agent is unable to respond to the customer’s request within the threshold wait time, he is placed in the priority queue. This queue exists to ensure that the applicant is served at priority and does not have to wait with another applicant again. Further, it eases the process for customers and helps them at each step, if they aren’t technologically equipped or are functioning on low bandwidth mode. The priority queue is checked before checking the standard queue. After assigning all the priority customers to agents, we then proceed to the standard queue.

For the best digital KYC call queueing and scheduling practices, we suggest the following:

1. Call Management: Keep call wait time shorter than 2 minutes to avoid call drops.

2. Queue Management: Monitor LIVE data from our dashboard

3. Funnel Management: Study what stage of the call customers are dropping off at, so you can identify the problem and rectify it instantly

4. Agent Management: Track your agents’ data carefully so you can solve any issues with their performance

Kwik.ID’s queueing and scheduling of call functionality, coupled with live dashboards for admin monitoring, makes Kwik.ID one of the best Video KYC tool for your business.

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Monitoring and Evaluating your Video KYC Sessions

When you invest in a new tool to speed up your business, you most certainly want to analyse your return-on-investment over a period of time. No matter how big or small a business is, you want every penny’s worth, and at Kwik.ID that’s what we want too – to help you get your money’s worth.

While our 100% RBI-Complaint Video KYC Solution enables your business to #KeepMoving, monitoring and evaluating these sessions to assess the result and the success of this new intervention is what matters the most. This is imperative, especially when you need to study the company’s continuous performance, efficiency and effectiveness of the solution. Let us help you with that.

Along with umpteen benefits that our tool offers, our real-time dashboard plays an integral role in gauging your Video KYC success. The Kwik.ID dashboard offers a range of statistics and measures for you to improve your performance and get the best out of Video KYC.

Some of its features include:

  1. Real-Time Statistics – No matter when you log in, you’ll see an updated data dashboard that’ll give you an overall insight on historic and live sessions details and help you analyse areas of improvement. Statistics like Video KYC sessions, requests rejected, accepted, and approved, along with a graph of sessions completed, will help make decisions for future Video KYC sessions.
  • Anytime, Anywhere – This real-time data dashboard is available at all hours, all year round. Additionally, being a low bandwidth platform, you can enjoy Video KYC at low bandwith on the go.
  • AI-powered – Be it our Facematch and Liveliness feature, or data driven analytics, each and every step in Video KYC verification is Artificial Intelligence reliant. Techniques like automated data extraction, machine learning, and streamlining complex processes, all rely on Artificial Intelligence, which gives you a clear picture.
  • Customisation – Kwik.ID’s Video KYC dashboard offers you the option to choose the types of charts you want to focus on and presents you with data based on your preferences. You can choose an overall summary, a chart to analyse how well your agents are performing, another to gauge how many sessions you conducted, and even where your calls are coming from, so you can focus on consumer segments differently.
  • Easy – At Kwik.ID we strive to make Video based KYC identification accessible and easy-to-comprehend for all, owing to which our dashboard is clear, crisp, and simple.

With a holistic approach to providing you with every minor detail that’ll help boost your Video KYC sessions, our statistics include the following:

  • Video KYC requests rejected and requests approved
  • The Video KYC  request approved are further divided into results rejected or approved
  • Average session duration to help minimise your call time and maximise productivity
  • Average queue wait time because you definitely don’t want to keep customers waiting
  • Time taken by an agent to respond to a request
  • Daily, weekly, monthly statistics for you to keep track of everything, everyday.

Data-centric dashboards are not just an additional offering, but a necessity, especially when you’re doing business online. Find out more by registering for a demo of the Video KYC in India offered by Kwik.ID, today.

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All about AI based Facematch & Liveliness Detection

As technology seems to be taking over the world, businesses rely heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI), for almost every aspect of work. AI has seeped not only into your personal life, but also your professional life – from handling everyday tasks, aiding critical problem solving, onboarding customers seamlessly, and improving the overall customer experience.

With Kwik.ID’s Video KYC verification, onboarding customers is certainly made easy, but what makes it trustworthy are the Facematch and Liveliness tools that detect frauds, and prevent impersonation or identity theft of any sort. With the recent advances in AI and deep learning technology, face recognition accuracy has significantly increased.

Facematch and Liveliness are probably the most essential security features which ensure that the user is authentic and there is no foul play involved. High-speed and extremely accurate face recognition technology is based on convolutional neural networks of the latest architecture and most progressive methods of training. The algorithm is based on the neural network and a machine learning approach, unlike “traditional” algorithms based on mathematical model. While active 3D techniques detect movements like eye-blinking and facial movements, passive 3D uses internal algorithms to detect frauds, together making spoofing difficult for the user.

Facematch and Liveliness tools have been pathbreaking innovations in recent times, that facilitate easy and hassle-free business no matter where you or your customers are.

It is no surprise then that so many industries and sectors choose a Video KYC process over a traditional KYC, to ensure that their onboarding process is 100% secure and smooth.

Apart from just adopting Video KYC, here are some industries/sectors that have begun transforming with these tools:

  • Banking: For the banking sector, customer security and fraud prevention is of utmost importance. Facial recognition allows users to log in securely from the mobile banking apps.
  • Finance and Fintech: Financial institutions opt for facial recognition and liveliness tools for instant loans or users making regular payments.
  • Hospitality: Facial recognition is a preferred choice for verifying and authorising guests, especially at check-in.
  • Marketing: The Facematch algorithm helps you analyse your customers’ gender and age and allows you to evaluate your marketing strategy.
  • Trading platforms and exchanges: Facematch and liveness tools can be integrated into the platforms for distant account registration and verification of the account owner.

Other similar fields that choose Kwik.ID’s video KYC for its automated AI tools include insurance companies, brokerages, e-wallets, and NBFCs too.

At Kwik.ID, your data security and privacy have always been our top priority, therefore adopting these AI-powered tools for our instant Video KYC process was a pre-requisite.

The biggest benefit to you is making sure you aren’t being spoofed by a potential customer. But there are so many more benefits too:

  • Aids organisations in speedy KYC / authentication process
  • Authentication methods are efficient and highly accurate
  • Saves time and resources
  • Convenient and cost-effective
  • Determines real user presence during any type of financial transactions
  • Prevents duplicate ids and multiple account registrations for the same user

All of these features make Kwik.ID’s Video KYC a promising tool, which when integrated with your business platform, seamlessly differentiates between actual customers and fake ones. Also with Kwik.ID you will be able to enjoy Video KYC at low bandwith.

So far, after conducting over 50,000+ sessions, and achieving a success rate of over 85% on Video KYC sessions, our biggest learning has been that AI-powered tools have been a major success factor to build trust among KwikID’s clientele, helping us help you.


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How to Achieve a Video KYC Completion Rate of Over 85%?

The world’s going digital with Video KYC verification to onboard customers instantly, and so are you, because you want what’s best for your business. But just as you’re closing the deal with a potential customer you lose connectivity and, in the bargain, lose your customer, too. That’s something you don’t have to worry about if you opt for Kwik.ID as your Video KYC solution providers.

Low bandwidth is just one of the many reasons why your business may not achieve its desired VKYC completion rate. Other factors include:

  • Customers being ill-prepared with insufficient documents before the Video KYC session.
  • Low lighting, which prevents the potential customer from being clearly detected by our Face Recognition Tool.
  • Customers not being tech-savvy enough.

There’s more to the list, but with Kwik.ID’s Video KYC solution one can be sure these hiccups don’t persist, and you achieve a completion rate of over 85% while onboarding customers in just 3 minutes. Every obstacle that lowers your completion rate is eliminated with our tools. 

  • Pre-session Guidance: Our tutorials make it easy for your customers to grasp the process better and stay prepared, well in advance, with the necessary official verification documents.
  • Low Bandwidth Support: One of the primary reasons for a poor Video KYC completion rate is low bandwidth, but with Kwik.ID you will enjoy all the benefits of Video KYC at low bandwith. In case the agent or the customer is located in an erratic network area, this feature will keep the session moving. Our minimum bandwidth requirement is also as low as 176 kbps. 
  • HD Quality: Our Facematch and Liveliness Tools are designed to adjust to low bandwidth, so no matter how poor the internet connection is, the data detected and captured is always HD quality.
  • Lighting Alert: Poor lighting is another major concern that leads to a drop in the completion rate. Before the session begins, our Light Detection tool studies the lighting around you and the customer and notifies you to move to a well-lit area so that the session can be swift and smooth. 
  • Inclusive Platform: At Kwik.ID, we push the envelope and endeavour to create an inclusive platform. To eliminate any language barrier and/or technical issues our Video KYC platform provides visual cues and assertive measures to guide with the process, so as to make it quick and intuitive. Our textual chat option also eliminates any linguistic issues that the agent or customer might face.
  • Tech Support: Customers who aren’t tech-savvy might shy away midway through a session, leading to a drop in the completion rate. To overcome this, our assisted Video KYC allows the customer to screen-share with the agent, requesting guidance for complex processes like Aadhaar XML Generation. 
  • Third-Party Elimination: Kwik.ID Video KYC’s straightforward interface connects the potential customer to an assigned agent with a quick click of a link, unlike many others that necessitate the need for an external app to carry out the session. You don’t need an app at all to do the Video KYC using Kwik.ID.

Apart from ensuring that your business can #KeepMoving with a high completion rate of VKYC sessions, some of our other advantages are:

  • Being 100% RBI Compliant.
  • Easy to integrate.
  • 100% Data Privacy.
  • Fraud Prevention.
  • Supports Chrome, Safari, Android, iOS.

So far our customers have achieved a completion rate of over 85% on Kwik.ID’s Video KYC sessions and apart from all the above elements that aid this success, our AI predictive technology is yet another factor that plays an important role in predicting a Video KYC completion. Using data like the customer’s location, psychographic, mobile carrier network, and more, the software predicts whether a VKYC session is going to be completed successfully or not. 

At Kwik.ID our business is to get your business moving. With an array of features and advantages, Kwik.ID promises to ease out your VKYC sessions, so you can onboard customer in just 3 minutes and conduct business, stress-free. 

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Our Learnings from Completing 50,000 Video KYC Sessions

When we started Kwik.ID, it was with the simple idea of offering a ‘Kwik’ solution to organizations across every financial sector, who want to expedite their KYC processes and onboard customers almost instantly. Today, we have to our credit over 50,000 video KYC sessions and a loyal clientele who encourage us to push the envelope.

Having worked with almost every finance-based segment out there, including Banks, NBFCs, Insurance organizations, FinTechs, and even Gaming and Forex, among others, our journey along with 50,000+ Video KYC verification sessions has taught us plenty.

On average we conduct 1500 sessions a day and can handle 15 parallel sessions at any given point of time. All these sessions across markets gave us an insight into how each customer is unique in terms of requirement. How then does a single product benefit them all?

We learnt that one of the key factors that organizations feared with online KYC, was frauds and identity theft. Our immediate response was to include a Fraud Check that verifies customer identity with AI-powered Facematch. Our Liveliness engine protects against fraudsters by ensuring they are physically present and do not use digital photos/printed photos at any time during the process. Features like central database verification of OVDs, fuzzy text matching between details on all OVDs, and document tampering risk score are some of the additional measures that we incorporated to protect organizations’ interest.

Another problem we witnessed were the rejections due to lack of awareness among customers and the drop-offs owing to internet connectivity. While the former has seen immense growth, with more organizations moving towards a quicker video KYC approach for their business, the latter was a matter of concern because we didn’t want to disappoint keen customers. We configured our solution to work on low bandwidth mode and support lower android versions too, (currently supporting 4.4+ which is compatible with 97% of handsets in India), to ensure that customers and agents (authorized personnel from an organization) both enjoy a seamless journey, no matter where they access our Kwik.ID solution from.

Apart from all of this, we aspire to cater to our clientele with an easy 4-step process and scheduling of calls for a suitable time, so customers can attend the video KYC session as per their convenience and your business can #KeepMoving too. Win-win for all!

One of the greatest learnings came in January 2020, when we went live with one of the largest FinTech organizations in India with our 100% API driven solution which supports IOS, Android and Web. It has reduced the organization’s KYC timeframe drastically with a session lasting an average of 1.5 minutes, instead of the traditional week-long KYC process. Tests were carried out across tier 1, 2, and 3 cities, and we found that there have been zero bugs since we went live. 

Other features like providing software updates for free, eliminating the need for additional applications, being 100% RBI Complaint, and providing daily, weekly and monthly statistics for monitoring growth, are add-ons that other organizations enjoy and trust us with. All of these add up to our excellence in Video based KYC identification.

As they say, success is a 2-way street. While organizations rely on us, we rely on them to help us better our product. So that we can design a finely-honed solution that effectively delivers on all the stringent KYC norms, and promises you the ease of doing business, wherever, whenever.

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Minimizing fraud with Video KYC

Financial institutions are mandated by law to carry out KYC to meet strict regulatory guidelines. It not only allows them to understand who their customer is but also functions as a pre-emptive safeguard against any potential illegal transactions.

While carrying out stringent KYC is quite a meticulous process, it is being remedied through the use of Adaptive AI. Wherein technology implements the necessary KYC processes and also incorporates learnings gained by observing the behavior of customers to differentiate between legitimate behavior patterns and suspicious ones.

By automating the KYC process, Video KYC securely verifies identities whilst detecting frauds and spoofing attempts on a real-time basis. This is done via the assimilation of a clear fraud decision-making framework coupled with robust data gathering and analysis. The different types of fraud checks during Video KYC verification are as follows:

Document Tampering: Kwik.ID’s AI based technology enables a quick face match between the selfie & photo on the identity document of the customer to check if the person submitting the documents matches the picture in them to avoid identity theft. Through its access to the central database, it also quickly verifies the legitimacy of the documents.

Further, an inbuilt feature in the video KYC solution checks if the official government ID provided has been tampered with. A risk score is generated to determine the legitimacy of the document. This ensures that the documents provided are the originals and not just a color photocopy.

Location Spoofing: Kwik.ID delivers very robust location intelligence to identify safe customers. At the beginning of Video based KYC identification, the live location (lat/long) of the customer through web browser/mobile is captured and in subsequent steps instant OCR of the POA document is done. Both the locations are fed into the distance algorithm and the address of POA is converted to lat/long. The distance between both location is calculated & if distance < 300 meters (configurable) then the current location gets tagged as HOME LOCATION.

Security Questions: A security question that needs to be answered by the customer undergoing the video KYC is included in this process to ensure that it is a live video session and not a pre-recorded one made by hackers.

All these features are integrated into Kwik.ID’s Video KYC solution to make it a comprehensive AI and data-driven decision-making platform.  This will serve as a valuable tool for FIs and other organizations to easily and seamlessly validate actual KYCs from fraudulent ones on a real-time basis.

To know more, reach out to us on info@getkwikid.com

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Is your organisation eligible for digital KYC?

Recent regulatory changes have enabled financial institutions (banks, NBFC, fintechs, lending start-ups, insurance, etc.) to perform Video based KYC identification to on-board customers remotely.

  • Amendment to Master Direction (MD) on KYC by RBI, 9th January 2020
  • Clarification on KYC process and Usage of Technology for KYC, by SEBI, 24th April 2020
  • Press release by IRDA regarding Paperless KYC process through Aadhaar Authentication Services of UIDAI, 24th April 2020

Digitally streamlined KYC verification has spread through the industry like a breath of fresh air, even as it eases the customer onboarding process for financial and non-BFSI companies.

Owing to the much-needed easing of the burden on time and manpower costs, industry experts have welcomed this decision allowing them to leverage digital channels for the Customer Identification Process (CIP). The video-based customer identification process will make presence-less and paperless banking a reality.

This Video KYC verification is carried out by capturing a live photo of the customers and their official valid document during video sessions using smartphones. Geotagging done by capturing the latitude and longitude of the location where the photo was taken will confirm if the customer was in India while submitting the proof.

As customers do not need to submit physical copies of identity proof, the possibilities for identity theft are eliminated. This, coupled with the advantages of lower KYC costs and seamless onboarding experience for borrowers, definitely makes it an attractive alternative to the current physical KYC.

Even though this method is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced face-matching technology to establish the user’s identity, the real onus of customer identification remains with the official. Hence, it is mandatory that this task will have to be performed only by officials of the Regulated Entities (REs).

This has definitely come as a blessing to fintech start-ups as they will not be required to invest in any equipment nor bear the cost of sending an official to remote locations for customer identification. Any organization looking to reap the benefits of Digital KYC will need to find the perfect technological partner who can provide them with the right tools to simplify their customers’ KYC journey.

The easing of the KYC norms by the Government might have made your company eligible for Digital KYC but is your organization tech ready to harness it?

To know more about Kwik.ID’s seamless e-KYC solution, please write to info@getkwikid.com.

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Optical Character Recognition: Revolutionizing the Know-Your-Customer Process

Traditional KYC procedures are infamously labour-intensive. They generally involve making a trip to a branch office and manually filling out forms that are time-consuming, costly, and limited to office hours.

Customers today expect instant gratification and will accept nothing less than real-time digital services round the clock. With digital competitors lurking around every corner to entice dissatisfied customers, it is imperative that companies don’t appear to be creating unnecessary hurdles whilst adhering to regulatory guidelines. This, coupled with the physical challenges of conducting business-as-usual during a global lockdown, creates more room for innovation than we’ve ever witnessed before.

Innovation in Isolation

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that recognizes text within a digital image and is used to convert virtually any kind of images containing text into machine-readable data. Prior to OCR technology, the only way to digitize printed paper documents was to re-type the text manually. This was not only time consuming but also increased the possibilities of human error.

While OCR is commonly used to recognize text in scanned documents, its technology is also used in data entry automation, indexing documents for search engines, automatic number plate recognition, as well as assisting the blind and visually impaired. It has been exceedingly useful in transforming historic newspapers and texts into searchable formats by digitizing them.

Optimizations through Machine Learning

A few common problems encountered by OCR over the years, such as blurs, glares, incorrect image capture are now being tackled by the use of Machine Learning. Obviously, conversion accuracy is important, and most OCR software delivers 98% to 99% accuracy.[1]

OCR solution by Kwik.ID:

The OCR solution offered by Kwik ID enables instant verification of OVD’s like Aadhaar, PAN, VoterID, Passport, and Driver’s License. It makes it easier to detect frauds through signature matching tools and leverages ML to spot problematic information. Furthermore, Kwik.ID also promises its customers of Video KYC at low bandwith with its collection of the Best Video KYC tools.

We have built a state of the art OCR engine that extracts meaningful information from the image of an identity card using the following module

  • Rotation and cropping of Image
  • Raw text detection from natural image
  • Extraction of meaningful data from Raw text
  1. Rotation and cropping of Image

For the text detection module to work properly, it’s essential to remove the background noise and make the ID card image horizontal with 0 degrees. However, since the image of the ID card is provided by an end-user, it may contain a lot of background noise & can be at any angle. This module helps in the perfect alignment of the image & removal of the background noises.

Raw image
Output after processing

2. Raw text detection from natural image

Once the card image is cropped and rotated, it is provided to the ML engine that detects text in the image. These detected texts are then extracted from the image along with their corresponding coordinates.

3. Extraction of meaningful data

In the final step, we extract meaningful information from the detected text in step two. However, just detecting raw text is not enough. We need to identify which text represents which information. For example, if two names are detected in an image, which one is the father’s name, and which one is the card holder’s name should be segregated. 

Here the coordinates extracted with each text play the role. Based on different types of cards, the extraction engine contains different templates for each type of ID card to identify the position of details.

While not a new technology, OCR has been fine-tuned via AI & ML making it an indispensable tool for quicker customer onboarding and thereby ensuring smoother Video KYC verification.

To know more about Kwik.ID’s seamless e-KYC solution, please write to info@getkwikid.com.


[1] https://tdwi.org/articles/2018/03/05/diq-all-how-accurate-is-your-data.aspx

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Embracing a Digital Future

With social distancing being the need of the hour, businesses have to find ways to ensure their continuity. This largely revolves around companies making their products and services available online.

The COVID-19-induced lockdown and consequent social distancing norms have especially opened up new avenues for companies offering digital customer verification. Most sectors have witnessed a boom in demand for digital KYC, including online education, matrimonial companies, gaming, crypto exchanges, and more[1].

The Finance Ministry, in turn, has permitted 29 insurance companies and 9 stock/securities entities to undertake Aadhaar authentication services[2]. This will be particularly beneficial for small and retail investors vis-à-vis the current lockdown situation, as they don’t need to provide physical documents as proof for KYC.

Further, the IAMAI has indicated that the time is right to replace lengthy in-person verification processes with comprehensive remote e-KYC innovations. This will help the financial services and payments industry to tide over the temporary setback caused due to the infeasibility of carrying out physical KYC for a long time to come.

The lockdown is now also forcing the loan and card issuance industry to prioritize digital lending. Granting of unsecured loans and issuance of credit cards while sitting at home could and very likely become the new normal, and all with zero paperwork. Think of the possibilities wherein through VCIP Digital KYC solutions an official could validate the customer’s documents instantly over video!

The current KYC process doesn’t incorporate social distancing as it still requires an in-person verification for OSV (Originally Seen & Verified) of OVDs (Officially Valid Documents). This crucial step in the KYC process can seamlessly be eliminated by leveraging new technology solutions, like Video KYC, to enable digital onboarding of customers.

Video KYC verification also enables risk management solutions like tracking and cybersecurity and containment of financial fraud. The AI and data analytic tools embedded in these solutions can streamline the lending process, thereby resulting in better underwriting and further reductions of costs in lending and collections.

 It’s time for us to take a leap ahead.

The Future is Now!

Learn more on how to seamlessly conduct KYC using Kwik.ID’s Digital & Video KYC solution at https://getkwikid.com/ or write to us at info@getkwikid.com.


[1] https://ibsintelligence.com/ibs-journal/ibs-news/video-kyc-covid19-forcing-digitization-banks-online-education/

[2] https://www.deccanherald.com/business/29-insurance-cos-9-securities-related-entities-can-collect-aadhaar-for-kyc-829910.html