Tier 1 Ugandan bank enables instant access to banking with digital KYC and customer onboarding by Laboremus

About the Bank

This bank is a leading banking and financial services company in Uganda. 

The bank’s Personal Banking division focuses on meeting the financial needs of the individual customers with fast, convenient and affordable financial solutions. 

With over a billion USD in assets and over 65 branches in Uganda, this bank is one of the largest financial institutions in Uganda serving millions of people with personal and corporate banking solutions. 

Mission

Become more digital and data-driven to improve customer experience

The bank leadership wanted to deliver exceptional customer experience, in line with their strategy of creating customer obsession. The bank wanted to meet customer demands efficiently and consistently to also get their customers obsessed with making the bank as a trusted financial partner. 

At the strategic level, this banking group has a prerogative to become more digital and data driven and use technology to deliver what customers want better and faster. 

Solution

Use digital KYC and onboarding to give customers instant access to bank accounts

With an ambitious goal of becoming more digital, the bank’s team started evaluating technology and solution vendors for improving the most paper-intensive part of the process - opening accounts and onboarding new customers. 

After researching the market, and having conversations with selected vendors, this bank chose Laboremus to be their infrastructure provider and expertise partner for digital KYC and customer onboarding. 

Impact

Incredible efficiency, process standardisation and 5-minute customer onboarding

After working with the Laboremus team to implement digital KYC and customer onboarding, the bank experienced a range of benefits from speed of onboarding new customers to making their internal processes more efficient. 

Fast, near-instant access to new bank accounts

Digital KYC and paperless customer onboarding allows the bank to open new customer accounts in under 5 minutes. All customer information is processed digitally and identity is instantly validated against the central NIRA database of Uganda. 

The new accounts have all the tools of the trade attached to them so new customers can start making transactions on the accounts immediately. 

This speeds up the bank's ability to make a positive impression on new customers and start positioning banking products and services, including credit, right away. 

Make account opening paperless and adaptable

The bank can now onboard new bank customers using the digital account opening form embedded into an online application. The entire process thus becomes paperless and brings operational efficiencies to the bank. 

Interestingly, a digital onboarding process also simplifies the process for changing or adding fields to the account opening form. It massively reduces wastage of stationery, cuts the time to roll-out changes and overall saves money in transporting paper forms.

Standardise data collection across customers

Previously, with the paper-based account opening process, many customer attributes were not properly filled in and this left gaps in customer profiles with missing information. In the past, this created barriers for the bank in analysing customer data. 

The new digital customer onboarding process has standardized that process of collecting key customer information. 

Many of the fields are now validated as mandatory and the submission of the digital application is not allowed unless those fields are correctly filled in the form. This has improved data quality for the bank and ensured that customer profiles are complete and standardised. 

Build enhanced customer profiles

The new digital KYC and customer onboarding has given the ability to change application forms quickly and collect data instantaneously to be sent to the bank’s database in minutes.

This has helped the bank build more sophisticated customer profiles efficiently and without gaps. Knowing your customer goes well beyond identity verification for the bank. By building rich customer profiles and profiling the market better, the bank has been able to create customised solutions and improve their marketing to its customers. 

The bank is now able to create banking solutions that are backed by the voice of the customer relying on customer data. Rather than create off the shelf solutions this bank is now creating smarter solutions that solve the problem of their core customers. 

Minimise the risk of fraud

With a completely human-free identity verification system from Laboremus, the bank has been able to reduce the risk of fraud by multiple factors. 

Using digital technology such as barcode verification, this bank can now easily decode something that is not genuine. Integration to NIRA to validate the authenticity of the ID brings down the exposure to fraud that could have been generated at account opening to minimal levels. 

Some forgery may still be possible but Laboremus’ infrastructure helps to bring it down to really controlled thresholds.

Future outlook

Grow the partnership with Laboremus to deepen the impact of digital

Partnering with Laboremus has truly helped this bank make great strides in achieving its strategic vision of becoming digital and data-driven. 

Account opening and digital KYC is merely the start of the process. In the future, working with Laboremus, the bank wants to continue digitising and standardising the delivery of banking solutions and services. A key project that’s part of this future vision is to digitise customer onboarding through agency channels. 

The leading bank is also working with Laboremus for more customised solutions that impact the entire customer lifecycle. The goal is to keep building products that tangibly improve customer acquisition and retention further and enable credit delivery to anyone, anywhere in Uganda. 

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