As per recent report from Wall Street Journal one quarter of 165,000 branches of various banks in Europe will go away in next three years (https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-banks-use-pandemic-to-clean-house-11613298601). In 2020, one of the biggest car rental company closed more than 600 physical locations in Europe and middle east (https://www.autorentalnews.com/354232/hertz-addresses-coronavirus-impact-closes-stores ). Story is no different is other sectors like insurance or gambling which historically generated lot of business from local branches. While many may believe it is because of Covid pandemic but reality is this trend had started almost 5 years ago and Covid simply fuelled the momentum. Low costs and speed from fully digital and innovative startups is putting high pressure on large and successful enterprises to change their operating procedures to make them agile and move fast. Or they run the risk of perishing in years to come.

Moving business online and signing up customers requires many steps, integrations and compliance to local regulations. One of the most important steps (even though not the most expansive in value chain) is remote KYC/onboarding. Marketing and compliance departments in many large companies are still trying to get their head around remote KYC and how best to balance user conversion rates vis a vis fraud risks. European enterprises (or multi nationals playing in European markets) expanding in various countries, the problem is exponentially complex given local regulations and consumer preferences.

Rightfully so, many companies are planning to completely outsource their remote KYC requirements to local startups (which are in plethora and many per country in Europe) as they expand. While this approach works technically it has a huge implication for future in terms of managing complexity and building multiple points of integrations can create a nightmare for IT departments. Not to mention business risk if one of the KYC startups get acquired or goes out of business.

As ID verification technologies are maturing and becoming better at detecting frauds, enterprises need to start thinking about remote KYC holistically and as key ingredient in their digital value chain. What that means is companies having businesses in multiple countries need to start assessing and selecting suppliers who are able to offer holistic identity verification platform for ease of integration, rollout and future maintenance. While for organizations the plans to digitize processes in different countries may come some time in future, it may already make sense to select partners and suppliers who can seamlessly fill those requirements easily in future whether it is about offering multiple identification methods which can be country specifics of offering various user checks as mandated by regulations (e.g. AML checks for financial services).

Single point of supplier management and technical integration can save millions in future for sourcing, legal and IT departments in companies. Single API and mobile app integration can ensure that companies can easily introduce new identification methods to their users seamlessly as they move to new country with least integration efforts.

While need for speed is of utmost importance for these large companies, but resulting decision making process shall not create further technical and commercial baggage for future which can prove fatal. Hence companies need to start putting their future expansion roadmap well ahead of time and think of whole remote customer onboarding holistically and look for selected partners who can easily enable them today and in future.