Digital banking and lending platform company, LEVERIS, today announced its partnership with ComplyAdvantage, the global technology company transforming financial crime detection, to ensure banks and lenders can offer their customers an onboarding experience that is seamless and AML-compliant.

Currently, the majority of financial service providers are failing their customers when it comes to onboarding. While many traditional banks have invested heavily in digital, their onboarding processes still fall short. That’s because very few can offer totally in-app onboarding and, even for those with a strong focus on digital, there is often a need to visit a website, call a customer representative, or show physical ID in a branch.

According to research from Infosys, global banks spend an average of $48m annually in onboarding new customers, which is increasing 15% each year. The same research suggests that banks could potentially lose $22.7bn due to slow onboarding process, and that 35% of bank customers who move to competitors, do so as a result of poor experiences during onboarding.

LEVERIS’ partnership with ComplyAdvantage is helping address the issues with customer onboarding in the financial services sector. ComplyAdvantage’s suite of financial crime detection tools seamlessly integrates into LEVERIS Digital Bank’s workflow, so that any bank or lender using the LEVERIS platform to offer financial services can provide a smooth onboarding experience to their customers that is fully compliant with the necessary regulations. That involves checking a new customer’s name against Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Sanctions and Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) lists. ComplyAdvantage will also carry out transaction monitoring, meaning beneficiaries are checked each time a customer completes a transaction.

These forensic processes take place seamlessly while the customer onboards. To onboard with a bank using the LEVERIS platform, it takes the customer just a few clicks to get from ‘create an account’ to the final screen of the onboarding journey, saving time, avoiding friction and minimising effort. LEVERIS estimates that this onboarding process is around 5-6 times faster than that offered by some of the most popular traditional banks in the UK, some of which  take anything up to 120 clicks to open an account.

Conor Fennelly, LEVERIS founder and CEO, said: “Our platform allows clients to bank, lend and provide financial services in a highly secure and seamless way. Our partnership with ComplyAdvantage plays a pivotal role in this and in our wider vision to make banking better. This is a great example of two innovative companies coming together to deliver an exceptional user experience with all the necessary security checks in the background. At a time when compliance and UX in banking have never been more important, we are excited about our continued work together.”

“We are very happy to be partnering with LEVERIS to support its compliance processes with robust AML technology,” said Charles Delingpole, founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage. “The partnership will provide LEVERIS with an all-in-one monitoring solution and help to achieve the joint goal of providing a seamless onboarding experience to all customers.”

The LEVERIS platform, which is entirely software-defined, operates in the cloud and is completely independent of legacy core banking technology, has already enabled major financial services firm, Link Group, to enter the Dutch mortgage servicing market. LEVERIS is also working with a licensed Electronic Money Institute (EMI) to provide Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) to non-financial companies wishing to enter the financial services space.

ComplyAdvantage’s technology uses best-in-class machine learning and natural language processing to help regulated organisations manage their risk obligations and prevent financial crime. The company’s proprietary database is derived from millions of data points that provide dynamic, real-time insights across sanctions, watchlists, politically exposed persons, and adverse media.

Despite the challenges faced by a global pandemic, 2020 has marked an exciting period for both ComplyAdvantage and LEVERIS. In August, ComplyAdvantage closed its series C after experiencing a period of rapid growth. In September, both LEVERIS and ComplyAdvantage were listed among seven fintech companies pioneering in their industry by leading science and tech online publication silicon republic.