Together, Finastra and AIO will help banks meet the heightened demand for business loans due to COVID-19 using a digital customer onboarding experience and a solid financial identity SaaS solution.

“In these challenging times, banks are struggling to meet the demand for the increased volume of business loans being submitted,” said Mitch Lucas, Head, Lending, Product Management & Compliance, Finastra. “Paper-based processes and antiquated systems for financial identity verification and customer onboarding are time-consuming and do not meet the demand for remote functionality. We are excited to offer AIO’s financial identity solution to our financial institution clients through our platform, FusionFabric.cloud, to accelerate loan origination and customer onboarding, reduce costs, improve efficiency and reduce fraud. The pandemic has brought the future forward with regard to digitization and our vision is to transform the world of financial services, supporting this accelerated digital shift.”

Governments around the world have launched significant support packages and guaranteed loan schemes for small and medium-sized businesses amidst COVID-19, but it is up to local banks to actually originate and administer such loans. However, customer screening and onboarding processes at most banks are outdated.

To establish a customer’s financial identity and meet Know Your Customer/Know Your Business (KYC/KYB) regulations, banks require applicants to collect many documents, usually in paper format, and hand them in at the branch or by email. Document verification for risk assessment and credit scoring is also done manually. Current processes are therefore expensive, slow and impractical during a pandemic and are prone to fraud and human errors.

“AIO accelerates customer onboarding by up to 80%. Our SaaS platform automates the collection and verification of digital financial documents,” said Yoram Bechler, Co-founder and CEO at AIO. “By making our solution available through Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud, we are able to reach more financial institutions, giving them the ability to leverage our customer-friendly mobile and web platform to meet KYC/KYB requirements and assess risk in just a few clicks. Automatic verification prevents fraud and document tampering.”

The customer-centric digital experience comes with built-in fraud prevention and privacy by design and can be provided as a standalone solution, or integrated with Fusion CreditQuest. It is built with customer privacy in mind, so all customer financial data resides with the customers and is stored on their systems, offering complete control over their financial data and self-sovereign identity, in compliance with current data protection regulation.

Several large multinational banks in the U.S. and Europe are already piloting AIO’s financial identity verification solution, with more expected to roll out in the coming months.