The revolution in the fintech industry has opened doorways for cybercriminals to commit financial crimes. Identity theft, document counterfeiting, phishing, scamming, and fraud are some of the prevalent crimes. Financial organizations unknowingly become the channel for illegal monetary flows for extreme crimes like money laundering and financing terrorist groups.
Therefore, financial institutes such as banks, insurance companies and cryptocurrency exchanges have established their guidelines on the document verification process. This is an essential component of KYC procedures and compulsory for AML/CFT compliance.
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Document Authentication in Financial Institutes
As mentioned, your financial organization must initiate an efficient document verification process. It mitigates financial crimes and prevents customers’ identity theft. Document authentication is mainly conducted to confirm that legitimate person’s own them and they are not forged or counterfeit. Financial institutes seek protection from potential criminals involved in illicit monetary practices through their document verification process. They identify financial criminals disguised as customers during KYC onboarding. Hence, it is mandatory for compliance with state and global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws and regulations.
Verification Documents Required for KYC Customer Onboarding
Banks and other financial institutions require specific government-issued documents to ensure the legal legitimacy of their customers during KYC onboarding. The necessary verification documents are identity proofs such as passports, licenses, financial statements, etc.
Cryptocurrency exchanges must ensure a coherent document verification process because the crypto industry is more vulnerable to fraudulent activities and crimes like money laundering and terrorist financing. Identity validity through the document verification process is critical in fraud deterrence, and it eliminates the opportunities for fraudsters, scammers, and financial criminals engaged in financial crimes through cyberspace.
Drawbacks of Manual Document Checking
Document collection, data extraction, document validation and manual verification are the four steps usually involved in the conventional document verification process. Manual document checking is conducted when the organization’s personnel hand-checks the identity documents.
This document verification method is slow and inefficient in fraud detection, consuming more time and resources. It may lead to AML compliance failures imposing hefty noncompliance fines on financial organizations. In addition, it may damage the organization’s credibility and reputation because it is much more liable to human error. Resultantly, this would compromise the accuracy and transparency of the document verification process. Instead of using the traditional approaches, financial organizations, especially banks and crypto marketplaces, must transition to a digital document verification process.
Digital or Online Document Verification for Efficient KYC Compliance
Unlike the manual process, financial institutes must switch to online document verification for smooth and efficient KYC compliance. They can detect suspicious customer accounts and false IDs while monitoring high-risk customers having a record of unusual financial activities.
It also assists in swift customer onboarding, regulatory compliance, fraud deterrence and preventing unlawful financial activities. As per a report, financial organizations are rapidly adopting artificially intelligent digital data extraction methods. Thus, the manual procedures will be reduced to half by 2024.
Why Should Your Organization Switch To AI-Backed Technologies?
Software solution companies operating in the fintech industry have introduced high-tech technologies based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. They are used to revolutionize the document verification process by providing automation. Your financial institution must adopt these AI-backed technologies to cope with the rising threat of cyber-financial crimes.
The most significant feature of these solutions is that they are shielded with security protocols, so they protect customer data from third-party access. This factor eliminates the threat of identity theft and data leaks from getting into the hands of fraudsters, money launderers and terrorist financiers. By 2030, about 80 percent of B2B transactions will be entirely digital.
OCR & ICR: A Milestone in Document Attestation
According to a report, over 15 million customer records were breached globally during the third quarter of 2022. Data theft is a significant threat to financial institutions. Financial organizations must seek machine learning-backed solutions to combat this threat.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the automated solutions used in document attestation. OCR reads the machine-detectable parts of the documents by scanning images and extracting their information. It provides banks and other financial institutes with an error-free, quick, reliable, transparent document verification process.
OCR is an automated tool used for data extraction and collection purposes that aids the document verification process. Automated document verification ensures the ownership and legitimate identity of the customer by carefully examining the documents. Moreover, it enhances the security of the customer onboarding process and surveillance.
Intelligent Character Recognition, or ICR, is the most high-tech innovation in OCR technology. It has established a benchmark in character recognition software due to its precise and quick data processing.
It is more technologically advanced and adaptive to various document types and layouts. ICR’s most prominent characteristic is its deep-learning ability, which can easily detect false documents and suspicious customers. Moreover, ICR’s handwriting recognition ability is the most unique and advanced feature introduced in machine learning-backed technologies. It digitizes the content of handwritten documents with utmost precision.
Summing Up
In a nutshell, the document verification process is highly significant for financial institutions to mitigate financial crimes. Digital and automated procedures are the most efficient methods to identify and verify legitimate customers.
AI-based technologies are crucial for your financial organization to prevent data breaches and identity theft while enhancing its KYC document verification process and ensuring AML/CFT compliance.
