Businesses need to be able to correctly identify their customers. It’s important for both customers and businesses since customer identification ensures client satisfaction and loyalty. For financial institutes, it’s also very important to know their customers in order to prevent fraud and money laundering. With customer identification, businesses can understand what their customers want and need and therefore anticipate the most efficient way of making products and presenting them to the target group.
ZignSec is a company that offers customer identification with existing bank accounts. Their API allows users to include existing bank accounts to prove their identities. For example, it allows for verifying addresses and other additional user credentials, depending on the country. For banks that wish to register new customers online, they are now able to use an open banking API solution, which provides proof of:
- Identity
- Bank account verifications
- Addresses
For the user, nothing changes. The information is stored whenever they log in to their accounts online. For the merchants, this API is favourable since businesses will be able to collect and get access to trusted information that is provided directly from the banks.
How KYC Can Help Your Company
Just as customer identification is valuable, it’s also beneficial for businesses to do a KYC (Know Your Customer). KYC is a practice that is carried out by companies to verify the identity of their clients. This practice complies with legal requirements and current laws and regulations. Today’s excessive use of the internet makes it necessary to define different types of standards in order to fight online fraud. These standards can be anything, from customer identification and KYC to ID scanning, e-ID, and PEP and sanction checks.
Basically, all types of standards for security control of identity require that a client demonstrates with both legal and binding evidence that he or she is who they say they are. When using KYC, companies can gain access to information related to a customer’s identity, such as:
- Verified name
- Date of birth
- Bank account number
- Address
*Sometimes the address is provided and sometimes not. It depends if it’s supported by the bank.