Banco Sabadell, a leading Spanish banking group, has taken a proactive approach to accelerate its digital transformation and improve user experience. Through a partnership with Onfido, an identity authentication and verification company, Banco Sabadell has implemented artificial intelligence and facial biometrics capabilities to identify and onboard clients remotely.
Recognition of this amazing feat of innovation came as Banco Sabadell was declared Winner, Best e-KYC at the recent Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2020 (GRB Awards) by The Digital Banker.
“Looking to overhaul and digitise its banking experience, Banco Sabadell has partnered with Onfido to transform its KYC process. Onfido’s technology has made it possible for Sabadell to implement an instantaneous and fully digital identity verification process by using biometric identification. The team’s efforts to accelerate end-to-end digital processes have been absolutely incredible,” said Nirav Patel, Managing Director at The Digital Banker during the awards ceremony.
“Banco Sabadell combines internal innovation with collaboration with startups to add to its value proposition and accelerate its time to market.”
Committed to digitisation and innovation
Banco Sabadell has been focusing on strengthening the relationship with its digital customers by launching new features and functionalities in its digital channels to meet their increasing demands. The combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and the exponential adoption of technology by customers in Spain has spurred efforts to deliver end-to-end digital processes and self-service capabilities. Banco Sabadell is also scaling up its organisational, methodological, and technological capabilities to improve productivity, improve user experience and enable partnerships on a large scale.
The Bank has developed new ways of working with agile methodologies and user testing capabilities, which have reduced the time required to analyse, develop, and deliver solutions for its customers. Furthermore, to provide customers with financial management resources and optimise the process for carrying out transactions remotely, it has simplified and improved the most frequently used features of its mobile app, thus enhancing its customers’ user experience. A recent example is the introduction of merchant logos in transaction records shown in the mobile app.
“Banco Sabadell has taken a proactive approach to accelerate its digital transformation initiatives to strengthen its customer relations.”
Banco Sabadell – through InnoCells, its digital innovation hub – combines in-house innovation with external capabilities, actively participating in the innovation ecosystem. Collaborating with startups on a large scale allows it to complement its value proposition, accelerate its time to market and offer its customers new features and functionalities. The partnership with Onfido is a clear example and, in a complex environment overshadowed by the current pandemic, has enabled the Bank to roll out new remote identification and authentication capabilities to offer its customers a faster and fully digital registration process.
Onfido’s technology is designed to complete the document verification process and confirm that the identity document sent by users matches their face, using facial biometrics. This ensures that the individual submitting the identity document is its rightful owner and is physically present at the time they are identified. Moreover, the technology eliminates the need to send additional documentation and makes the process significantly faster for the customer and Banco Sabadell.
As part of the Bank’s firm commitment to expanding its offering of digital services, self-service features are now available to customers on digital channels, thanks to improving and digitalising processes that had, until now, required customers to use other channels (branch network, telephone service, etc.).
Banco Sabadell has selected Onfido, out of several digital onboarding providers, for its excellent fraud detection engine and the ease with which it can be integrated into the Bank’s digital channels. Now that it has been integrated into Banco Sabadell’s security platform, it is ready to be rolled out to the Bank’s other business processes, as it can be used as OCR technology, comparing selfie photographs and selfie videos against customers’ official documents to verify their identity, thus meeting the regulatory and statutory requirements of the various processes that are to be digitised.
Moreover, the integration of Onfido’s technology into Banco Sabadell’s systems has paved the way for other noteworthy internal projects, including new, 100% digital customer onboarding system, or fully digital processes (e.g., change of mobile phone number, PIN, etc).
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