CurrencyFair used GBG Multi Bureau to boost match rates by 21% – and onboard more customers, more quickly
About
CurrencyFair offers an online cross-border payment and foreign exchange service to retail customers
Company size
200 employees
Industry
Financial Services
Location
Global
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The challenge
Financial services businesses must carefully check new customers’ identities to comply with global KYC and AML regulations and to help prevent fraud. However, they also have to make onboarding quick and frictionless, with minimum manual intervention.
Ireland-based CurrencyFair faces exactly this challenge. A GBG customer since its foundation in 2010, its state-of-the-art online registration process combines GBG’s ID3global for electronic identity verification (eIDV) and Loqate’s rapid addressing.
With reference data for over 4 billion people worldwide, ID3global handles identity checks in seconds while Loqate helps customers enter their addresses quickly and accurately. By capturing standardised, error-free address data, Loqate helps improve eIDV match rates too. GBG’s international coverage also lets the rapidly-expanding CurrencyFair simply “switch on” eIDV and rapid addressing as it moves into new territories like Hong Kong and Singapore.
If a new CurrencyFair customer’s name, date of birth and address matched against at least two reference records, all they had to do was upload a photo of themselves. But if their details didn’t match, they had to send images of documents like passports, driving licences or utility bills for manual review.
This added significant onboarding friction: over a third of new customers interacted with the service team for this reason. That ate up valuable staff time, wasting over two man-days every week.
Even worse, around 10% of all new applicants failed to provide documents and dropped out altogether – cutting CurrencyFair’s revenue.
The biggest value added for us was the number of people who now don’t have to provide proof of address.
The solution
In early 2021, GBG’s account manager reviewed the current matching results and pro-actively suggested that CurrencyFair explore its GBG Multi Bureau service for UK customer checking. Results from other GBG clients showed how well the upgrade had worked for them.
An easy, instant upgrade for ID3global, Multi Bureau increases the volume of unique credit records available to match new customers against – making a double credit header match more likely. This increases match rates and the number of customers that can pass “straight through”, with no need for document uploads and manual checking.
A double credit header match is seen as the gold standard for KYC checking, demonstrating enhanced regulatory compliance to bodies like the UK’s FCA.
To ensure true multiple matching, GBG dedupes the source credit files against each other. This ensures each reference credit event in GBG Multi Bureau is unique and there’s no risk of double matching (where customers are matched to the same credit event like a loan or mortgage application on different credit source files).
Would the extra reference data improve CurrencyFair’s match rate? A month’s trial made finding the answer easy. GBG’s professional services team handled all the work, configuring and running the trial for CurrencyFair, delivering interim progress updates and then reporting the final results.
21%
Uplift in CurrencyFair’s match rates, meaning more new customers can be accepted immediately
The outcome
Overall results from the trial were excellent, comfortably outstripping GBG’s predictions. Matching against GBG’s enhanced credit file instantly lifted match rates by 12%, then introducing a second credit reference source added a further 9%.
With match rates rising 21% overall, thousands more new customers now move straight through to the next stage of onboarding with no need to provide document scans. That gives a smoother customer experience and frees up service staff for more productive work.
Even better, there has been a significant reduction in drop-off rates. With more new customers being accepted every day, business income has already increased markedly.
CurrencyFair was delighted with this enhanced process that simultaneously raised KYC confidence levels while reducing onboarding friction. GBG Multi Bureau is now an integral part of onboarding for its UK customers and the company is about to trial a similar upgrade for German customers.