For banks, insurers and retailers, onboarding customers has long been a time-consuming and costly process, prone to delays and possible errors and risk. AI-enabled automation allows organisations to slash the time taken to onboard new customers, dramatically reduce costs and improve accuracy and efficiency.
This is according to Jeremy Engelbrecht, Managing Director of SoftiDoc – a South African developer of SaaS solutions for document processing, KYC, identity validation and customer onboarding. With a high-precision biometric identity verification platform and an AI-driven OCR engine, SoftiDoc’s locally developed solutions cut onboarding processing from around 30 minutes per customer to just a few seconds.
“At minimum wage, the cost to manually extract data from 10 000 transactions a month would total around R150 000, whereas when this process is automated it would cost around R10 000,” he says. Further savings are achieved by not routing verifications through Home Affairs, which charges a R10 fee per transaction, but by using advanced technology to scan the customer’s ID card and check them for liveness instead.
SoftiDoc extracts all data fields from physical and digital South African ID documents, ID cards, passports, driver's licences and other government-issued identification documents.
“Our AI biometric technology checks for liveness and then matches the live person to the photo on the ID. We look at the bar code on the back of the ID; we correlate it with the data on the front; and we also check the hologram on the ID,” Engelbrecht says.
He explains that SoftiDoc also automatically extrapolates data from the customer’s payslip and bank statement and runs an AI analysis on these. Automation reduces the risk of errors and fraud, as well as making the process more efficient, he notes.
“The whole process can be automated to take literally seconds, whereas the traditional way requires agents to go through these documents line for line,” he says.
“We then send back the details the client needs and we delete the data because we are ISO 27001 accredited and FICA and POPIA compliant,” he says.
As a South African company, SoftiDoc is able to offer customers significant savings over imported solutions. Because the SoftiDoc AI tech is built locally for local conditions, it also offers features South African customers require, such as flagging the payday of a customer so that the system can collect payment as soon as the salary is deposited.
“Some customers withdraw their entire salary as soon as it is in their account, leaving creditors begging,” Engelbrecht says. “Our solution has helped a leading retailer improve collections by up to 20%.”
SoftiDoc processes over a million requests a month for leading brands such as XDS, Lewis and Pep. However, its automated customer onboarding is also priced within reach of smaller businesses and micro-lenders.
“We offer flexible pricing, and companies can simply buy credits on our platform, so advanced onboarding automation is within reach of every business – from a one-man show to a large bank,” Engelbrecht says.
To learn more and try the solution, go to https://softidoc.com/.
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