Telia Norway

# Telia Norway reduced fraud cost by 4 million NOK in 9 months

The mobile market in Norway is highly competitive, and as in any market, fraud is increasing – in particular in digital channels where it is harder to establish the true identity of the new customers. As digital channels are growing in importance to acquire new customers, fraud is also increasing as a consequence of the difficulties to establish true identity. Hence Telia experienced the challenge of providing convenience for new customers to sign up online with the need to manage growing levels of fraud.

This meant that Telia needed a solution to reduce fraud while maintaining security and a convenient user experience to become a new mobile customer online. In addition, the digital journey to on-board a new customer had to compliant with know-your-customer (KYC) regulatory requirements.

Telia decided to try to reduce this fraud from digital channels by adding identity verification of all new mobile customers, using Signicat’s APIs. The challenge was to reduce fraud while maintaining existing conversion rates online.

# The solution

In April 2019, Telia Norway required all new mobile users signing up through their web page, to verify their identity digitally using the Norwegian electronic identity (eID) BankID, delivered through Signicat.

For Telia Norway the choice of partner for the digital customer journey was based on the fact that Signicat – a trusted provider of digital identity services for many years – had already delivered digital identity services to other business areas in Telia.

Telia Norway simply integrated the Signicat APIs into their customer on-boarding workflow, and new mobile customers are now able to easily identify themselves with their digital BankID credentials to prove they are who they say they are. Telia combines this with a background credit check of the customer.

To become a customer of Telia, the customer journey is short and simple: the customer types in their existing mobile number and date of birth, and then choses BankID or BankID on Mobile, in the few simple steps shown below. It is worth noting that the new mobile customer can only use a digital identity to prove their identity online; Telia does not accept other methods (e.g. entering in name and address with offline verification). This was a key decision to ensure a simple and secure user experience. For other methods, the customer has to visit a Telia shop.

# The results

Since the implementation of the digital customer onboarding service in April 2019, Telia Norway has already seen tangible benefits. Compared to the previous manual process for identity verification and credit check, the new online process is much faster and eliminates the risk of human error.

Since the launch, Telia Norway has reduced fraud cost by ca. 4 million NOK. The user experience is simpler and the steps to become a new mobile customer has been reduced significantly. Telia has been able to redeploy two full time equivalent people devoted to manually following up and verifying customer data, to tasks that create more value.

The adoption of digital identity verification for new customers has positioned Telia as a secure, trusted and innovative partner and provides a simpler digital onboarding customer process than other competitors in the market. Furthermore, although Telia Norway required all new customers to present their digital identity during onboarding, this did not reduce the completion rate, which remains at over 70 %.