Signzy: Future of Financial Services Using Artificial Intelligence

• 25 July 2020 | 1651 Views | By Abhinav Mishra

Why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the future of financial services?

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform the way services are delivered to customers in the financial sector. On the front end, the conversational AI like chatbots is becoming more mainstream to enhance the customer experience. At the backend, it allows more tailored and informed services and products, enhance cybersecurity, increases internal process efficiencies and reduce risk. The power of AI could also be harnessed by government agencies engaged in economic forecasting. As per experts and analyst estimates, AI will save the banking industry roughly $1 trillion by 2030.

In this article, we are going to talk about Signzy, a company that through a combination of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, ensures that digital compliance is convenient and secure for its customers. Signzy offers a digital onboarding solution for NBFCs, banks, and other financial institutions.

In the last few years, most banking services are going digital but one key process that is still offline and is troublesome for consumers is regulatory compliance. Signzy is working to change that experience for consumers. They are into the business for only 5 years and they have some of the biggest names in the banking domain as their clients. Some of its clients are MasterCard, SBI, ICICI Bank & Mahindra Finance. In 2017, Signzy was also listed among Top 30 Global Digital Financial Implementations by MAS Singapore.

There 3 main components of global digital trust system are:

• ability to uniquely identify and authenticate entities
• know more background information about entities
• a system of punishment and reward which reinforces trust.

Signzy is winners of RBI’s Payment Systems Innovation Contest, 2016. During the contest, the experts labeled their idea as ‘ahead of time.’ They have been able to change that perception over the past years. Here are a few points which make them unique in many ways:

How is AI used in financial services?

Enhanced User Experience – They offer interactive digital onboarding system to make users’ journey hassle-free. They eliminate the form filling and physical visits to the banks/offices through their platform which combines the power of document reading, facial recognition, and multiple financial dataset integration.

Scalable Backend Operations – Their AI and learning-based core regulatory engine help businesses reduce cost, scale faster, and cut turnaround time. Their platform makes use of simulating human intelligence to offer Intelligent Process Automation in business processing.

Privacy and security – These are two main pillars for any business especially banks. They have a privacy-first design principle which enables them to create a state of the art security and data protection infrastructure. They also have the image and video fraud checks to ensure their systems remain safe from digital fraudsters.

How AI can be used in banking?

Signzy offers different products and solutions to help businesses grow. Below are 2 products they offer:

Video KYC – Signzy designed its system for banking grade technology. This means that they meet the strictest data security requirements and infosec regulations. Using Signzy’s Video KYC, thousands of customers are onboarded every month by SEBI regulated institutions. This product is advanced enough to handle dialects, browsers, and low internet speed. The features under this product are:

• Real-time PAN verification
• Matching face on ID with face in a video with a % confidence score
• Unlimited video storage and instant retrieval
• Video forensics for pre-recorded risk and spoof detection
• Digital forgery check and the displayed ID proof
• Customer identity verification through offline Aadhaar XML

Customers Onboarding – When the investigations of fraud cases are done, in most of the cases, it is due to human complicity. Signzy’s onboarding technology uses AI to provide human-like intelligence to data/documents which cannot be compromised. The product has features like image extraction, validation, forgery check, classification, object detection, video-based identity verification and liveliness check which makes it a complete end to end process in customer onboarding.

How artificial intelligence is changing the banking sector?

Banking is one of the oldest and most important industries in any country. Over the past couple of decades, it has increasingly been transformed by adopting newer technologies. With the growth of fintech, banks can now make use of modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence and IoT.

Read about The Indian Challenger Bank Scenario.

Signzy provides multiple solutions to banks, some of them are as follows:

Solution 1 – Payments

Digital payment is one of the largest growing industries. However, acceptance of payment instruments is still a challenge. Signzy provides AI-based risk solutions that reduce merchant risk and total digital client onboarding solutions that reduce KYC costs.

Signzy has partnered with MasterCard and offers a complete end-to-end automated application and underwriting tool to help Acquirers onboard merchants in a more digitized and automated way, removing all bottlenecks from the onboarding process using Digital KYC. Below are some features underpayment solutions are:

• Digital Business check
• Online ID check
• Automated background risk checks
• Digital income check
• Secure digital contracts
• Modern UI backend dashboard

Solution 2 – Retail Banking

Under retail banking, Signzy services are designed for 3 categories:

Individual Saving A/C onboarding – This is for banks dealing with individual customer accounts. Banks will have the below benefits:

a) Interactive form with auto-population option.

b) Under this service, banks can have real-time digital verification of KYC documents.

SME Current A/C onboarding – This is for small and medium businesses who wish to open a current account with the bank. Benefits are as below:

a) Interactive form with auto-population option.

b) Banks can digitally onboard multiple authorized signatories parallelly which saves a lot of time circulating application from one person to another.

c) Algorithmic risk assessment of customers based on entity compliance rules

Branch automation – Using this solution from Signzy, banks can automate their branches.

(a) With advanced ICR, OCR, and object detection techniques, 35.5 Lacs documents can be scanned per day by banks.

(b) They can save processing time up to 18 minutes per/form.

(c) Signzy provides 99.2% accuracy in object detection for error-free results.

(d) Bank can save up to 24,000 man-hours across the organization per day.

(e) Advanced biometrics for accurate facial recognition.

AI Impact in Corporate Banking Process

Solution 3 – Corporate Banking 

When it comes to banking, an important parameter to consider is the verification and authenticity of the parties involved. With this solution, Signzy helps its customers find or eliminate people who have provided incorrect or false information to them or have been responsible for the same in the past in some other financial and banking software. They also use automated and comprehensive regulatory checks which enable banks to mitigate risk in dealing with large enterprises for both Liabilities and Assets products offered.

How will AI affect finance?

AI in finance is for sure paying dividends to businesses and customers in financial industries. AI in finance is transforming the way you interact with money. It is helping the financial industry to optimize and streamline processes ranging from quantitative trading to credit decisions and financial risk management.

What is the future of the banking sector in India?

The Indian banking sector will continue to grow and digitization and modern technologies like AI will play a significant role in its growth story. The future is for sure bright since the banks in India have already taken on technology and are ready to innovate through the use of technology.

Companies like Signzy will definitely play their part in the growth story. A lot of statutory data is available in the banking sector and Signzy wants to digitize it using AI and Blockchain. In the coming years, it will create risk profiles based on the data available and help reduce instances of mismanagement and fraud. Signzy is also getting a boost from the government’s push for a paperless economy. Hopefully, they will help banks save a lot of operational costs and also make the life of consumers easy.