Regional bank met critical AML and KYC compliance while embarking on a digital-first future with Persona

The bank is employee-owned and operates nationally with multiple physical locations across the midwestern US. Besides mortgage lending, commercial banking, and agricultural banking, the bank offers personal banking and a full suite of deposit products across multiple brands.

Problem: The bank's existing KYC solution lacked the flexibility and robustness it needed for a national expansion

The regional bank had been expanding beyond its origins as a community bank by attracting more customers and deposits nationwide. But to better compete with large national banks, the bank knew it would need to accelerate its digital, mobile-first transformation.

A key part of this transformation? Empowering customers to open an account online and onboard remotely without needing to visit a local branch — while still complying with the AML and KYC requirements required by law. 

"Our core banking software has a digital account opening solution, which we used for about three years," said the bank’s digital transformation officer. "But it really couldn't meet our needs for a number of reasons."

The first reason was that it couldn't be customized. While the solution was convenient — it was, after all, embedded within the bank's core banking software — the bank couldn't customize it to better meet its business objectives or customer needs. It was stuck with the fields, verification flow, and branding that came with the solution out of the box.

The second reason was that the existing solution didn't have an effective way to capture customer IDs or documents that the bank needed to collect for verification. Once customers submitted their application, they would receive a request by email to submit their documents. It wasn't a seamless process, leading to confusion and drop-offs.

"Even successful account openings were taking 30-35 minutes to complete," said the digital transformation officer.

Finally, the solution wasn't able to handle fraud attempts at scale, forcing the bank to implement manual fraud reviews as part of onboarding to ensure fraudsters weren't getting through.

“It lacked a number of automated checks that could have stopped fraudsters from getting through in the first place,” said the bank’s deposit operations manager. “We were spending hours each week cleaning up.”

With these complexities multiplied across multiple product lines and brands, the bank knew it needed to start looking for a more robust option.

“At the end of the day, the solution was really built for small community banks,” said the digital transformation officer. “But we’re trying to market our products nationally, at a much larger scale, to people who are never going to come into a branch. We were trying to make it work, but it just wasn’t designed for that.”

Solution: The bank partnered with Persona for automated KYC verifications across brands and product lines

After considering its options — including potentially building its own solution from scratch — the regional bank ultimately decided to partner with Persona. A few of the reasons it went with Persona included:

Automated verification 

One of the key capabilities the bank was looking for in a solution was the ability to automate identity verification for digital account openings — a need that Persona's suite of identity tools was specifically designed to meet.

“The automated verification piece was really something that the deposit operations team was looking for,” said the deposit operations manager. “So much of what we used to have to do manually, we can now do automatically with Persona.”

With Persona, when an individual wants to open an account digitally, they’re prompted upfront to capture and upload a photo of their government ID and a selfie. The information on their government ID (e.g., address, date of birth) is automatically extracted via OCR technology and compared against information from a government database. In cases where the address in the ID and database are inconsistent, the user is prompted to upload a document for proof of address. At the same time, the selfie is algorithmically analyzed and compared against the portrait in the ID, looking for discrepancies that might point to spoofing.

For individuals that pass this initial round of verification, the workflow automatically runs reports to see if they’re on a government watchlist and/or politically exposed persons (PEP) database, which prompts more stringent verification.

“It saves us a lot of time and is a much more seamless process for users compared to the old system,” said the digital transformation officer.

Flexibility

Another consideration for the bank was flexibility. Frustrated with the constraints and inflexibility of its existing solution, the bank knew that whatever solution it chose, it needed to be customizable.

“In our old system, we were severely limited in what we could change and adjust,” said the digital transformation officer. “We couldn’t add fields, text, or branding to the screens or adjust the onboarding flow to meet our needs.”

With Persona, the bank was able to take full control over the content of its onboarding flow: adding and removing fields as necessary, deciding which verification methods would be deployed when, inserting educational messaging throughout the flow to ease customer confusion, and more. Likewise, it was able to tailor the logo, color palette, and other branding details to each of its brands for consistent messaging.

Integrations and low-code environment

Finally, the bank was looking for a low-code environment that would be relatively easy to set up, maintain, and integrate with its existing ecosystem of other tools.

According to the digital transformation officer, “it’s relatively easy to make adjustments using Persona’s template editor, and there’s a real bang for your buck in terms of how much effort goes into making a change and how much value you get out of it.”

The digital transformation officer also noted that Persona did a lot of technical heavy lifting during implementation, helping the bank design templates, deploy workflows, and tweak the product based on what the company was trying to do.

“We were a little worried that support would drop off after implementation,” said the digital transformation officer. “But we’re glad to say that Persona has continued being spectacular whenever we have a question or are running into an issue trying to get something done. It’s been incredibly helpful.”

Results: Persona streamlined IDV and fraud detection, leading to faster account opens and less fraud — and empowered the bank to pursue its digital transformation

In the six months since it deployed Persona for IDV, the bank was already seeing benefits from the switch.

Before Persona, customers took an average of 12 minutes to get through the initial application to open a new account; back-end processing could take an additional week. With Persona, customers finished their applications in an average of five minutes — less than half the time.

“With some additional tweaks to the onboarding flow, we’re hoping to eventually get initial applications down to two minutes,” says the digital transformation officer.

When fraud did occur, the automated nature of Persona's fraud scanning tools meant that the bank had a much easier time handling it and cleaning things up.

“In the past, we’ve seen large-scale fraud attempts. Sometimes it might result in having to shut down new online applications for at least a week while we deal with the fraudulent applicants,” said the deposit operations manager. “But the most recent time it happened, we weren’t even affected by it because Persona did such a great job of weeding out the bad actors automatically. That means less research on our part and the ability to keep applications open.”

Looking ahead, the bank was excited to make additional improvements to its onboarding flows by integrating additional data sources like customer surveys, net promoter scores, and even voice options. And while the bank wasn't using Persona to conduct KYB on business banking accounts just yet, it had a goal of getting there.

“When the time comes, if we can complete KYB and facilitate business banking account opening through Persona, that would be another big win for us,” said the digital transformation officer.

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