Digital Onboarding: acquiring new customers in the digital age

Safe, easy and fast. This is how the process of identifying and certifying new online customers should be. This procedure, known as “digital onboarding“, can be used in many sectors, from companies to public administrations to banking institutions. 

ABI notes that in Italy, more than 56% of banks have implemented a Digital Onboarding procedure. The digitalisation of the process of acquiring new customers brings many advantages, including:

• reduction of costs: both business and acquisition of new customers
• increased security: data is validated and complies with regulations and GDPR
• customer loyalty: by studying users’ needs, processes can be streamlined and the experience improved.

Furthermore, fully digitalising an operation such as onboarding allows the client to enjoy full autonomy and perform the operation at any time.  This is how the bank responds effectively to needs such as we experienced during the pandemic, where it was necessary to offer the same level of service, while limiting travel, with a totally new approach. It is therefore important to carefully design the service and identify the most suitable technologies. 

Artificial Intelligence plays a key role in the implementation of these services, providing advanced technologies such as Virtual Agents, Machine Learning, computer vision and biometric recognition techniques. Skills in this area allow for the realisation of quality digital services that consistently and innovatively meet project objectives.

At Antreem, we have developed a mobile application for an international company operating in the finance sector that is able to identify customer data, thanks to the acquisition of identification documents. Working together with the client, we analysed the users’ needs and requirements, created the User Experience and implemented a recognition system, capable of identifying both paper and electronic documents and, thanks to the data obtained, updating the Database and monitoring access statistics.

To do this, we used two recognition technologies: OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NFC (Near Field Communication). The first enables optical recognition of text characters via the smartphone camera, while the second enables two-way data exchange, thanks to the chip on the documents. This latter technology is the same as that used for contactless payments, which turn mobile devices into virtual wallets from which transactions can be made by simply bringing the phone to the POS. 

Implementing a Digital Onboarding service is an opportunity to facilitate the acquisition of new customers but also a simplification for already loyal customers by combining it with new products and/or services that are entirely digital.