Junior Biola, EasyDebit CEO, says a real-time verification solution for customer verification is imperative.
In the past, financial institutions processed the transactions of a business and charged them per transaction regardless of whether the transactions were successful or not. This is where EasyDebit identified a need in the market and developed a model that predicts the collections success probability by establishing the best dates to collect payment on a particular account. This proved to increase the success rate of collections and improve business cash flow.
Challenges in the market
Junior Biola, EasyDebit CEO, explains that high levels of consumer credit default, slow service providers, and poor customer verification are just some of the challenges faced by business that expose them to financial risk.
“Customers have historically relied on external service providers that mostly did this type of work in a delayed manner, taking days to provide an analysis,” he says. “Services were not part of an integrated process and were performed manually as a separate process.”
Businesses were victims of fraud in many ways, with people presenting identity documents or producing banking details that didn’t belong to them.
Easydebit product suite
EasyDebit has addressed a number of verification and collection gaps with its product suite.
One of its verification products, Strike Date Optimisation (SDO), is a system that ensures that transactions are done on the date that they are most likely to succeed.
The company has also developed a real-time identity verification system that uses a customer’s identity number and fingerprint or face to determine their true identity against the Home Affairs’ database.
The suite supports the customer credit lifecycle, starting at the customer acquisition stage when it is important to establish that the customer is who they claim to be by performing a series of verifications.
“When a customer produces an ID book, the business has to establish that the ID belongs to that customer,” Biola says. “We make this possible through a system that allows fingerprint capturing, and through their fingerprint we can verify that the fingerprint belongs to their ID number.”
The system returns the picture linked to the ID as well as the full names associated with that ID, all done in real-time. This software eliminates identity fraud, and mitigates the risk of dealing with information that doesn’t belong to the person who produced it.
Establishing the ownership and correctness of a person’s bank account is also critical during the customer acquisition stage. When a customer provides their banking details the bank account verification service (AVS) can, in real-time, determine if those details are linked to the person’s ID number, and that the account number is still valid, can be debited, and has been open for more than three months.
Cost-saving measures
Many businesses tend to lose a lot of money through failed debit order collections caused by incorrect banking details. With real-time bank account verification, EasyDebit can, at the point of engagement with the customer, confirm the bank account details and enable the business to rectify any errors before the collection instructions are submitted.
Competitive edge
EasyDebit states that in the payment industry, there is no other company that currently provides a real-time predictive model that tells businesses when the best day of the month is to debit a customer. Their scope of verification services is also unique in that it spans across the entire customer credit lifecycle, mitigating risk and increasing business cash flow.
Increased cash flow
The Strike Date Optimisation service reduces collection costs and increases the collections success ratio of a business, translating into more money in the bank. The product has been very well received in the market and its usage has been growing exponentially.
Their biometric verification service is released as a desktop service or mobile application (which was shortlisted in the MTN App of the Year awards). The potential benefits of the verification product suite are as follows:
- Improved customer experience
- Reduced paperwork
- Reduced identity fraud
- Eliminates internal document fraud
- Improved innovation and competitiveness
At the moment the verification suite is only available in South Africa, but the company has started engaging with countries in the SADAC region. Their biggest clients include major telecommunications companies, retailers, insurers, and the health & fitness industry.
To get a sense of what real-time data verification, through facial recognition feels like, visit EasyDebit at the Finance Indaba Africa.
