As more customers move online to access digital financial services, identity fraud is growing too. Without robust identity checks done during the onboarding process, businesses are losing an average of $2.79 million yearly to false identities and fraudulent signups.
However, these fraud risks isn’t only felt on your business revenue, you also lose customers, become non-compliant with KYC requirements, and build less trust for your product or service. This is why every business should check that the account and identity information shared by a user is valid and belongs to them, before fully onboarding them.
How is identity verification done today?
When users sign up for a new service, businesses typically require them to provide identity details such as their date of birth, home address, bank verification number (BVN), or a government-issued ID like a driver’s license or international passport. Then, businesses manually check the authenticity and validity of these details against existing databases to confirm the user's identity.
Regardless of how you verify your customers' identity, the process should be instant, accurate, and secure, while also being convenient for the user. However, current identity verification methods don’t meet these standards, as they are often slow and prone to errors.
What about verifying the identity of users differently?
With identity verification patterns changing, customer expectations on how they want to be verified and onboarded to your service are also evolving. They expect the experience to be quick and secure, without requiring them to go through multiple verification steps.
In response to this need to automate the process for how businesses verify the identity of customers, and cut down the long and repetitive verification steps for users, we decided to build the Mono Lookup product suite, to enable businesses to instantly verify the identity information of users and businesses in real-time, against self-submitted data such as their BVN, CAC, house address, government-issued ID, and more.
This convenient experience that Mono Lookup offers has allowed more users to securely share their identity information with the businesses they trust, and enabled businesses to verify users’ identities more accurately and improve their onboarding completion rates.
Down the line, as more Nigerian businesses opted for Mono Lookup to build secure and frictionless verification flows within their product we noticed an interesting pattern.
How Mono helped businesses verify the identity of over 1 million users in 2023
In the last four years, users have connected 4,948,006 accounts via Mono and securely shared their financial data (transactions, identity, statements, income, balance) with African businesses.
In 2023, we noticed a significant number of users were choosing to verify their identity details using Mono Lookup. We looked at the numbers and saw that, 1,509,984 users had shared their identity data using Mono, in one year.
We also analyzed the top industries they shared their identity data with and found this:
1. Lending/BNPL: 37.28% of these users have shared their identity data with Lending and Buy Now, Pay Later businesses when they were applying for loans or needed to access financing for their purchases at the checkout.
Digging deeper, here’s one of the ways this is possible with the Mono Lookup endpoints. For example, with our CAC Lookup endpoint, lenders can verify the registration details of a business before offering them SME loans, or they could use the BVN Lookup endpoint to verify the identity of a potential borrower.
2. Payments: To prove ownership of their financial account and complete payments faster at checkout, 25.43% of users have shared their identity and account information using Mono.
Here’s a simple scenario for this. Before a user can process a payment from their account, the business can use the Account Number validation Lookup to prove that the account details submitted by the user are valid and belong to them, reducing the risk of fraudulent transactions.
3. Digital Banking: To prevent suspicious account signups and the possibility of identity fraud, digital banking services require users to submit various identity documents to verify their identity. For example, you could be asked to upload a utility bill as proof of address during onboarding, so the business can manually check that it matches the information they have on file.
To make this process faster and less manual, 19.49% of users securely verified their identity and account information with Mono, completed their onboarding and accessed the services they needed faster.
4. Others: 17.80% of users spread across other industries like KYC providers, Real Estate investing, Software services, Agrictech, and Accounting also used Mono to share their identity data with these businesses.
How does using Mono for identity verification impact businesses?
After months of using Mono APIs for secure identity verification within their product, businesses have reported that suspicious and fraudulent account sign-ups reduced by 90% and their onboarding completion rates increased by 60%.
This secure access to users’ verified identity data also enables businesses to build innovative and more personalised experiences. This could mean:
Being able to automate their manual verification process and onboard customers faster. With the onboarding experience improved, more customers can complete the signup process and conversions are increased.
Enabling a quicker and more seamless process to verify the account and identity information of users signing up to use their services.
Building more compliant KYC processes that enable them to thoroughly and accurately verify users’ identity and account ownership directly from the financial institutions, and ensure that they can make informed, risk-free decisions about who to onboard to their service.
How does this benefit the everyday user?
As a user who uses Mono for verifying their identity details, you can experience benefits like:
More control over your data: With traditional verification processes, you can’t choose what kind of information a business has access to or for how long they can keep your data in their systems when you share your identity details. However, identity verification services like Mono Lookup gives you more control over which businesses can access your account and identity information, and how it is used for different verification purposes.
Easier onboarding: Instead of waiting hours for your identity to be manually verified by the business when signing up for a new service, with Mono Lookup, you can skip these long verification flows and easily share your accurate identity information, get fully onboarded, and access more personally relevant services.
Seamless payment experiences: With Mono’s identity verification service, you can securely prove your account ownership and identity to make payments online. This reduces the number of clicks you need to make, to confirm your authenticity and make a successful payment for your purchase.
What’s next for secure identity data sharing?
With our identity verification solution, Mono Lookup, we are enabling possibilities for businesses and their users. This makes it easier and quicker for businesses to verify their customers at onboarding and maintain KYC standards, which is why we have seen an increase in customers using Mono to verify their identity.
What we can learn from this, is that users are more confident about sharing their identity information with businesses that use automated and more seamless verification flows. So, businesses who want to convert more user signups and improve their existing onboarding experience, can step up their identity verification process using Mono. Doing the opposite might mean losing customers at the beginning of their onboarding or leaving your business open to possible fraud risk.
If your business is looking to power more seamless and personalized onboarding experiences within your product and verify users instantly with the Mono Lookup APIs, you can get started here or email our team at sales@mono.co to share your specific business use case.
