• 72% want bank-led digital identity to ease on-boarding pain
• 52% would apply for more services if process was entirely digital

Trondheim, Norway, 23^rd May 2018 — New research released today reveals that retail banks now lose 52% of potential customers at the on-boarding stage, an increase of 35% in the last two years.

The Battle to On-Board II report was commissioned by Signicat, the world’s leading trusted digital identity provider. The report looks at digital identity and its effect on retail bank on-boarding in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and follows up on similar research carried out two years ago.

Banks must comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) requirements when on-boarding new customers. This requires personal information to be shared, and identity to be proven. While much of the process can be completed online, in many cases the proof of identity (checking passport, driving license, etc.) phase must be completed in person or documents sent through the post.

The initial 2016 report was focused solely on the UK and found that banks were struggling to on-board consumers thanks to over-reliance on paper processes and a lack of digital identity. 40% of customers were giving up at this last step, frustrated. The new research paints an even bleaker picture across Europe with 52% of respondents admitting abandoning applications. This is more disturbing in the UK where the number rises to 56%.

The 2018 report not only highlights the issue that is preventing customers from completing applications, but also reveals what consumers want to solve the problem. An overwhelming majority of Europeans, 72%, want their banks to offer a fully-digital on-boarding system. This won’t just make them more likely to complete an application, but will also help increase revenue from customers—52% of consumers would be more likely to use additional services from a bank that allowed them to on-board without the need to use paper-based identity. Indeed, the use of digital identity could help gain cross-border customers as the majority of respondents wanted an ID they could use across Europe. This is especially true in Sweden where only 22% did not want this.

Consumers are also clear on who should lead the charge on digital identity. Banks were the number one choice in every country surveyed, trusted to deliver a system over the government or a social media giant.

“The research uncovered some fascinating consumer behaviour around digital identities. It shows that customers that have verified and trusted digital identities are more likely to sign up for more financial products,” said Gunnar Nordseth, CEO, Signicat. “Customers trust banks to supply this identity above governments and social media and in markets where there isn’t a pervasive digital identity scheme, this presents a significant opportunity for banks to increase revenues. Given the potential upside of increased sales, it is clearly worth the banks’ while to explore this further.”

The report The Battle to On-Board II is available for download. It is based on a survey of 4000 consumers across the UK, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden by Sapio Research.

The report is available here:

https://www.signicat.com/resources/battle-to-on-board-2-report/

– ENDS –

About Signicat
Based in Trondheim, Norway, and founded in 2007, Signicat operates the largest Digital Identity Hub in the world, offering the only complete identity platform in the market and trusted to reduce the burden of compliance in highly regulated markets.

With Signicat, service providers can build and leverage existing customer credentials to connect users, devices and even ‘things’ across channels, services and markets transforming identity into an asset rather than a burden. By ditching manual, paper based processes and replacing them with digital identity assurance, customer on-boarding is accelerated and access to services is made simple and secure. Signicat’s Identity Hub is a complete solution to that offers compliance and a route to better customer engagement.

Signicat has over 200 financial services organisations as clients, connects to more than 20 schemes globally and verifies more than 10m identities per month.

For more information, visit: https://www.signicat.com/contact/

Media Contacts:

CCgroup for Signicat:

Nicole Louis, Alan Miller

Signicat@ccgrouppr.com

+44(0) 203 824 9205

Wednesday, 16th May 2018, The PayPapers: In 2017, Rabobank and Signicat teamed up to enter the Dutch identity market by providing digital services to businesses and supporting them in servicing their clients.

This joint Digital Identity Service Provider (DISP) offers a range of online login, identity, signature and archiving solutions under the banner of Rabo eBusiness. The Paypers sits down with Alexander Zwart from Rabobank to discuss how Rabo eBusiness developed over the last year and how Dutch consumers prefer to identify themselves.

Could you please provide more details about Rabo eBusiness: what was the idea behind this initiative, what are the groups it addresses, and how is Rabo eBusiness helping these customer groups?

A few years ago, a group of Dutch banks have started iDEAL, a popular payment scheme in the Netherlands, used for online shopping. However, when these banks brought iDEAL to the Dutch market, Payment Service Providers like Adyen or Buckaroo acknowledged that merchants wanted to offer not only iDEAL, but also a wide variety of payment methods, e.g. credit card or PayPal. Therefore, the banks developed this service together, but what they failed to see is that one payment method does not solve all the problems of an online merchant.

Moreover, when the Dutch banks started an online identity scheme, such as iDIN, the question we asked ourselves was: does iDIN solve the whole challenge that merchants face with online identity? We believed that it did not: merchants need more identity options than what the iDIN offered – they required a Digital Identity Service Provider (DISP). We proceeded by looking for PSPs that were already offering identity options in Europe and found Signicat, an experienced and respected DISP in Europe. We wanted to create a solution that would meet identity needs on both sides of the online interaction; both for the consumers who want to identify themselves securely online, as well as for merchants who want to ease the customer’s journey.

So Rabo eBusiness is really a partnership; we have this business together with Signicat and we share its profits. Signicat and Rabobank operate together, both on the product management side, developing the product, as well as on the sales side. We entered the market with a basic proposition, i.e. we offer the possibility of using multiple identity services, like Google login, iDIN, and DigiD – an identity service delivered by the Dutch government, and we plan to expand our product portfolio in the near future.

Does Rabo eBusiness service all industries, or do you focus on specific segments of the market?

On the consumer side, when it comes to the people who use identity, Rabobank has a great coverage in the Netherlands. 94% of the Dutch population have an electronic ID, according to a survey commissioned by Signicat, which will be included in the Battle for Onboarding report that will be launched in May 2018. Of these people, 68 % use their ID to buy financial products.

Our primary focus, therefore, is the financial sector itself. Rabobank is the best launching platform for Signicat, because our customers, i.e. people who buy our products, are already used to identifying themselves via our bank. One of Rabo eBusiness’ first customer was Rabobank itself – Rabobank “bought” the product from itself, and used the identity proposition from Signicat to allow its clients who don’t have a Rabobank ID, but who might have an online ID solution from the competing banks, access the bank’s services.

What made Signicat’s implementation within Rabobank successful? Where there any challenges?

Signicat is very experienced in connecting complex IT parties like Rabobank. The biggest challenge, therefore, was not the part of cooperating with Signicat, yet for Rabobank to take a new look at identity. It took us some time to adapt our architecture to an open structure, accessible for people outside the bank.

Signicat has made connecting with other large parties a very easy experience, and as a result Rabobank is able to smoothly connect with large organizations now. I have mentioned earlier that one of our business focus is the financial services sector; for us financial institutions and insurance companies are a good match.

Therefore, we are proud to announce that we have recently partnered with Aegon, another large financial services provider in the Netherlands, and managed to integrate our solution in their IT systems frictionless due to the Signicat’s experience in connecting large parties.

Thanks to fintechs and challenger banks, incumbent financial service providers are under more pressure than ever for market share. It is critical, therefore, that customers can use applications as smoothly as possible—as any bumps in the road will lead to abandonment. In the Netherlands, what is still needed to drive adoption of identity services?

There are a few challenges ahead; firstly, we need to make identity services as easy to use as the big techs do, both on the consumer and the merchant side. On the consumer side, it is very important that the identity scheme you prefer is offered on all devices, especially on the mobile phone and within an IoT environment. This is why banks have invested a lot in making iDIN available for mobile. On the merchant side, it is important that you can offer a broad set of identity services/schemes to your customers (iDIN, DigiD, Google ID, Facebook ID, etc.), to maximize conversion rates.

Secondly, iDIN needs to be seen as a trustworthy, and preferred means of identifying oneself. However, things are pointing in the right direction: iDIN is used by an increasing number of people and organizations in the Netherlands, increasing the trust and goodwill towards this identity service.

Thirdly, we need to keep on working on the distribution on the merchant side. People have to see it in the market, so that consumers are convinced of its convenience and accessibility, and merchants are assured of its power to increase conversion. Luckily, Signicat has a lot of experience and expertise in creating a smooth onboarding process.

How do you see the identity services space evolving over the next 5-10 years in Europe?

Definitely identity will remain a key topic for the next decade. One can see that governments, companies, and people want to do more online. This makes digital identity increasingly important and will grow tremendously. Moreover, the Signicat research shows that banks are a trusted institution for consumers as their safe house for identity, more than social networks, so there is a big opportunity for banks to take the lead in identity services.

Webinar
For more great insights from Rabobank, Signicat and iDIN tune in on the 30th of May to The Battle to Onboard II webinar, in which they will discuss how you can keep your customers happy with the help of seamless on-boarding og digital identity. Click here to register.

New research looks in-depth at this growing dynamic, including Signicat’s work with Rabobank

Trondheim, Norway, 27th April 2018—Signicat, the world’s leading digital identity provider, has been profiled in Lafferty Group’s in-depth research on the collaborations between financial providers often seen as rivals: Bank-Fintech Partnerships: Deployment Lessons from Around the World.

The report explores the opportunities available to both banks and fintechs by partnering rather than only competing, and includes 21 detailed case studies. It examines how banks are not just partnering with fintechs in order to provide new services to their customers, but also how banks can learn from fintech culture to solve business issues.

The deep dive into Signicat’s partnership with Rabobank covers the creation of a Digital Identity Service Provider (DISP) in the Netherlands, Rabo eBusiness, designed to replicate the success of BankID in Norway. As the report notes, “there is a gap between the metrics on an eID card and the requirements for digital onboarding of customers in financial institutions that is also sufficient for Customer Due Diligence…Rabobank will offer customers a trusted digital identity that they can then use to access all kinds of other services.”

“At Signicat, we believe that fintech providers and banks are not enemies, and a great deal of potential can be unlocked when they work together,” said Gunnar Nordseth, CEO, Signicat. “We’re delighted that Lafferty has chosen to profile our collaboration with Rabobank as an example of this working in practice.”

The report is part of Lafferty’s Retail Banking 2020 research, and a sample is available here: http://reports.lafferty.com/reports-store/retail-banking-2020-research-service/artificial-intelligence-and-robotics-in-banking.html

About Signicat
Based in Trondheim, Norway, and founded in 2007, Signicat operates the largest Digital Identity Hub in the world, offering the only complete identity platform in the market and trusted to reduce the burden of compliance in highly regulated markets.

With Signicat, service providers can build and leverage existing customer credentials to connect users, devices and even ‘things’ across channels, services and markets transforming identity into an asset rather than a burden. By ditching manual, paper based processes and replacing them with digital identity assurance, customer on-boarding is accelerated and access to services is made simple and secure. Signicat’s Identity Hub is a complete solution to that offers compliance and a route to better customer engagement.

Signicat has over 200 financial services organisations as clients, connects to more than 20 schemes globally and verifies more than 10m identities per month.

For more information, visit: https://www.signicat.com/contact/

Great News: Signicat has been pre-selected as a Nominee at the Florin Awards Europe – Fintech Security Fair!

Vote for the Winner here – best innovative practices in “Securing Transactions”

The state of Identity in the UK is far behind that in the rest of Europe, and this is central to the success of consumer-focused fintech and financial services.

Link to the article from International Business Times, Business Fintech, February 15 2018

By Gunnar Nordseth

The UK currently enjoys a dominant position in European financial services, including fintech. London fintech firms have enjoyed £3.5bn of investment over the last five years—more than five times any other European city—with 2017 a record year. The hottest and most digitally advanced companies base themselves in London, with the effect that digitisation is sweeping the financial services market.

The UK attracts the talent, it is home to some of the most technologically ambitious companies in Europe, its regulatory structure encourages innovation and, as a global metropolis, it has the infrastructure needed to facilitate global trade. At first glance the UK is in an enviable position as the rest of the world focuses its attention on the wave of innovation in financial services, but all is not as rosy as it seems.

One key area of infrastructure has slipped through the cracks and now threatens to topple the UK from its perch. The state of Identity in the UK is far behind that in the rest of Europe. It might seem completely unconnected but it is, in fact, central to the success of consumer-focused fintech and financial services. The UK still operates a paper-based identity infrastructure where identity is proven with a passport, driving licence or other item such as a utility bill. This is then checked and verified by hand by someone not necessarily trained to do so. This takes time, is expensive, inefficient and subject to a catalogue of mistakes.

Why is identity central to financial services?

In order to access any financial service, a customer’s identity has to be established and proven to the satisfaction of regulations. Signicat’s survey in 2016 found that 40% of people have abandoned a signup process in the UK because of the time it took and the difficulty in proving their identity. If customers are unable to access services, how are businesses expected to succeed? Financial services companies have made much of being 100% digital, but for the moment access remains a barrier to that goal. In the UK, the vast majority of financial services organisations do not allow for anyone to prove their identity digitally to the satisfaction of regulations. Identity remains analogue and paper-based, relying on passports, driving licenses and even utility bills. A report into bank onboarding by analyst house PAID Strategies found that nearly all high street banks require consumers to go through manual processes for ID—and the only one that did have a digital process didn’t work on smartphones or tablets.

If consumers cannot access financial services digitally, the UK will face two main consequences. Firstly, thanks to the EU’s labour laws, Europe’s population enjoys freedom of movement and the right to work in any member state. As part of this, through the eIDAS regulation, the EU is mandating that electronic identity (eID) schemes are interoperable across the region. This helps with opening bank accounts, applying for mortgages and accessing other essential services. Since the UK does not have an eID scheme that satisfies financial regulations, it will be left out in the cold. If people are unable to open bank accounts, rent or buy properties or use government services, why would they choose to come?

Secondly, this inability to onboard new customers will make the outlook for these businesses rather bleak. For smaller fintech companies, funding and investment will start to dry up with countries that have embraced eID (such as those in Scandinavia, already a hotbed of fintech innovation) reaping the benefits. For the largest financial services firms, the millions spent on becoming digital businesses will be wasted.

GOV.UK Verify to the rescue?

All is not as dark as it seems however. The UK’s digital identity scheme, GOV.UK Verify, was created with big ambitions. In 2015, a business case predicted a 90% success rate for those people and businesses looking to identify themselves through the scheme. It was also predicted that up to 77 different public services would be likely to use the system.

GOV.UK Verify has, to date, fallen well short of these aims. Only fifteen services use it, and only 37% of those who have attempted to create a digital ID have been able to access the service they intended to.

On the face of it this looks like one more government IT failure of the type that so often gets press attention, as lofty goals don’t match the results achieved. But GOV.UK Verify isn’t fatally flawed—it actually needs to be more ambitious in order to succeed.

Unlike other European digital ID schemes GOV.UK Verify is limited to the public sector, does not support financial services and is not interoperable with its continental counterparts. Currently there are no plans to extend the schemes capabilities beyond vague promises with no timeline.

The UK needs to look to digital identity schemes elsewhere; to find success, they need to emulate success. One of the world’s leading digital ID successes is Norway’s Bank ID. Bank ID is used by 3.7m Norwegians, with over a million using the system on mobile. As the name suggests, its original use was for banking products, but this has now extended to signing leases, accessing secure post, and more.

GOV.UK Verify aimed to conquer public services first and then be made available for use by private services, and herein lies the flaw. People simply don’t engage with public services often enough for digital ID to be a regular part of their lives. Filing tax returns and renewing vehicle tax are performed annually, while other services such as renewing driving licenses are only necessary every decade. It’s unlikely that people will remember their credentials with such a long gap between uses. Using GOV.UK Verify won’t be a simple process for most—instead many users will need to go through the rigmarole of resetting passwords and recovering IDs, sometimes via post. If the process of using GOV.UK Verify is so painful, why would anyone want to use it more regularly?

The private sector provides online services people use every day. For example, people use banking for regular tasks such as paying bills, moving money between accounts, and checking their balance. Identity and signing is also common for more than just financial services: signing leases, receiving recorded deliveries and secure post, and proving your age when buying age-restricted items. Using eID for these purposes is far more convenient than the current methods that involve card readers, presenting utility bills or passports.

The new Public/Private Partnership

To make a success of digital identity, it’s vital to have buy-in from those corporations that have already performed the due diligence on so many identities—retail banks. A public/private partnership of government and banks is the only way l to get a digital identity system working across multiple sectors and—a must for success—getting individuals and businesses to see the benefit of such a system and use it.

It’s crucial to build a digital identity system that will be popular with everyone using it as Europe makes efforts to make each country’s digital identity interoperable. The EU’s eIDAS project is a framework where the ambition is that anyone or any business in the EU can safely and securely identify itself to any other business in the EU. eIDAS is part of the EU’s plan to create a digital single market, which aims to “tear down regulatory walls” and make goods and services more universal. If the plan is successful, there’s no reason why a business in Barcelona could not take advantage of an innovative new service created in Tallinn.

The EU estimates that a single digital market could contribute €415 billion per year to the economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Without a suitable digital identity scheme, the UK will be locked out of this opportunity, and may have to abdicate its financial services crown—a second tier digital identity scheme will ultimately simply mean a second-tier economy.

Gunnar Nordseth is CEO of Signicat.