If you are a bank or fintech, then you are probably already familiar with the challenges that make business onboarding so complex and time-consuming:
You might lack automated workflows that connect to multiple data sources.
You could also be operating within disparate systems that create data silos.
You need to put a strong focus on compliance, which takes a lot of time and resources.
You might also depend on your regulatory compliance procedures to identify suspicious behavior — instead of thorough fraud checks.
As a result, many banks still have to rely on in-branch business onboarding instead of being able to offer those customers a digital experience. Both banks and fintechs utilize batch processes instead of real-time processing, creating more manual reviews and operational burdens. And these days, cases of business identity theft and synthetic business fraud are on the rise, which means more risk and susceptibility to fraud threats during business onboarding.
Despite these issues, business onboarding still presents one of your most significant opportunities to increase deposits. So, how can you improve the process?
An Identity Risk Solution like Alloy lets you create a smoother onboarding experience that also helps you stay compliant, fight fraud, and even tailor your service offerings specifically to individual customer needs.
Alloy is a complete Identity Risk Solution — an end-to-end platform to manage identity, fraud, credit, and compliance risks, beginning at onboarding and continuing throughout the customer lifecycle. Alloy works with over 500 of the world's leading banks, fintechs, and credit unions to power consumer and business onboarding, ongoing AML & fraud monitoring, and credit decisioning. It uses data orchestration to help you:
Quickly automate and customize KYC, KYB, AML, and fraud checks
Simultaneously verify both the business entity and the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs)
View activity histories of all your customers’ actions
Trigger automated step-up verifications on an as-needed basis
Determine the risk level of customers at onboarding
Take an agile approach to fraud prevention, responding faster to more sophisticated fraud attacks
Establish real-time identity verification and ongoing monitoring practices
Leverage information gathered during onboarding in the credit underwriting process
Use alternative underwriting data in tandem with traditional credit score information to accept more applicants
When you are facing this set of intricate challenges, it is difficult to know where to begin. That’s why Alloy has pre-built integrations to 190+ data sources and out-of-the-box rules to help you set up clean, automated workflows without coding. You can also customize and choose different data sources according to your needs. Alloy’s experts are here to advise you on how to layer these tools for the best protection that also streamlines processes, reduces manual tasks, and accelerates application processing times.
Best of all, there is no need to rip and replace existing solutions because Alloy can seamlessly integrate into your current tech stacks. You only have to integrate once, but you get to optimize your workflows forever.
The Alloy SDK is a codeless solution for customer onboarding.
The regulatory environment is an ever-changing landscape. You have to maintain a robust compliance program, keep up with evolving consumer expectations, keep track of current and pending legislation, and monitor the latest compliance trends. That means you need agility and scalability in your tech stack.
Alloy has flexible queues, automatic assignment capabilities, and customizable filters, so you can:
Quickly change and adapt the workflow to accommodate evolving regulations
Operate within 195 different markets while remaining compliant
Effectively handle and resolve alerts
Collaborate and investigate suspicious activity alongside additional team members
Respond efficiently to any potential fraud threats
Ingest large volumes of data and scale as needed
Remember, as much as you want to avoid regulatory penalties, strong compliance measures are also about protecting your reputation. You can trust that Alloy will help you take the right actions.
KYB and business onboarding processes are more multifaceted compared to KYC. There are additional variables in the workflow when you verify a business as opposed to a consumer:
Collecting and validating documents
Verifying identities and addresses of beneficial owners
Confirming ownership/connection of an individual to the business
Running credit reports
Verifying sources of wealth through financial transactions and bank statements
Assessing the company’s risk profile
Ensuring all compliance requirements are met
Finalizing onboarding
Many banks and fintechs simply do not have the framework to move towards and support better digital onboarding for businesses. But with an Identity Risk Solution like Alloy, you can conduct both a KYB review and KYC reviews for UBOs, while running fraud checks in tandem.
Different types of businesses need different KYB processes to comply with corresponding regulations. Some require more manual intervention than others, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). And it can get complicated — especially when the ownership structure has multiple layers of businesses.
Many banks do not even offer digital onboarding to SMBs. They still require in-person onboarding because their legacy technology cannot accommodate an SMB’s complexity. Meanwhile, fintechs often struggle to come up with the resources needed to accommodate these more complex workflows. And both have trouble managing the sheer amount of data that KYB requires, which becomes exceedingly difficult to view, let alone unify, analyze, and then take action on.
This is not the way to unlock growth opportunities and future-proof your business. In comparison, Alloy allows you to onboard and monitor SMB customers without sacrificing compliance or becoming more susceptible to fraud.
SMBs are an important customer segment, but you will face significant challenges setting up the necessary KYB workflows — including the amount of data you have to process, the different business types you have to account for, and your reliance on KYC workflows. However, you can leverage Alloy to navigate these challenges, create smoother KYB processes, and reduce friction throughout the SMB customer lifecycle.
Get a copy of Alloy’s eBook about moving trickier customer segments through the KYB process.
Prior to partnering with Alloy, Novo experienced a time-consuming business onboarding process, resulting in low client growth and retention. The Alloy integration allowed Novo to combine multiple data sources into a single dashboard, then quickly and easily change rules and data sources to continue optimizing onboarding flows as-needed. Now, after implementing Alloy, Novo users can apply for a business checking account in less than 5 minutes.
With Alloy, Novo experienced the following:
Manual reviews were reduced by 50%.
Workflows automatically decisioned 68% of applicants.
The number of good customer applications grew by 200%.
Banks and fintechs tend to over-rely on compliance processes to serve as fraud checks. However, 91% of the respondents in Alloy’s Annual State of Fraud Benchmark Report stated that they have seen an increase in fraud year-over-year. It becomes clear that these compliance processes do not adequately address the evolving tactics and strategies employed by fraudsters. When 43% of all cybersecurity attacks target small businesses, this puts you at greater risk for fraud attacks and financial losses.
The best time to actually identify and stop fraud is during onboarding and loan origination — before any bad actors have been approved. With Alloy, you get more visibility into suspicious activity and more flexibility to adapt to new threats, so you can actively prevent fraud from the start.
Fraud is everywhere, and fraudsters will always be on the lookout for loopholes in your system. Alternative data sources — including non-traditional data sets like social media activity, rent history, utility bill payments, or secondary income from a gig job — diversify the information you use to identify suspicious behavior. With the ability to run evaluations through multiple data providers simultaneously, cross-reference the data, and even verify against non-traditional documents like tax returns and bank statements, Alloy provides you with a more comprehensive picture of identity. (It just got tougher for fraudsters to evade your detection.)
When fintech platform Ramp launched in 2019, they prioritized KYB and KYC checks to avoid costly mistakes and comply with their partner bank's stringent requirements. Since then, Ramp has worked with Alloy to manage their customer onboarding process and stay AML compliant while minimizing risk and fraud.
With Alloy, Ramp has experienced:
75% improvement in fraud detection efficiency
25% reduction in application review time
90% of applications sent to manual review are resolved quickly
Alloy works with the most trusted global technology and data providers to help our clients access the resources they need.
