Veriff and Crown Agents Bank: A digital solution with the human touch
Among other services, Crown Agents Bank provides a pensions payroll offering. This used to involve manual forms, but the bank recognised there must be an easier way to handle this task. High abandonment rates, however, proved to be a side effect of the technology that was implemented, until Veriff stepped in with customized processes that didn’t purely rely on tech.
Chris Hooper
Crown Agents Bank is a UK regulated bank that has existed for around 190 years and has just opened its first European office in a bid to expand globally.
Its aim is to transform the way payments and FX move through emerging markets, reducing friction so that more money gets to those who need it.
Crown Agents Bank serves a customer base comprised of a combination of central banks, commercial banks, international development organizations, NGOs and a range of fintech companies, and works with remittance companies, foreign exchange and brokers as well as money service bureaus.
It also has a long-standing relationship with international government pension schemes and is increasingly working with more UK-based local government pension schemes and third-party administrators or private sector in-house schemes.
What business problem did Veriff solve for Crown Agents Bank?
The solutions that Crown Agents Bank provides to their pension clients is pension payroll services – and in particular international pension payroll. As an ancillary service to that, Crown Agents Bank provides proof-of-life solutions.
Historically, this has entailed pension funds sending out manual forms. Pensioners would then be asked to complete the forms, sign them, gain third-party attestation from a notary of sorts and then post the forms back to either Crown Agents Bank or the fund directly.
This worked as a solution for many years, but Crown Agents Bank recognised that today, there’s technology in place that can better serve those pension funds and give them a higher level of assurance. This way of working benefits pensioners, too – providing alternatives to manual processes that involved them filling out forms, gaining attestation and then worrying about the postage.
What we really like about Veriff’s technology is that it keeps the end user within the journey. It doesn't allow the individual to get right to the end of the process and say, “Sorry, this hasn't worked”. Instead, it guides them using assisted image capture along the way. It holds their hand – and that’s exactly what, with our demographic, we need it to do.
What made the difference to Crown Agents Bank when choosing Veriff?
Crown Agents Bank made a conscious decision not to go down the app route. Its hypothesis was that the commitment of downloading an app and the technical document that was needed in order to complete the journey this way wouldn’t best serve the demographic they were working with, so they decided against it.
Another factor was that in a previous proof of concept, it was discovered that members were often relying on help from family members and/or carers. As such, they were experiencing a large number of declines.
Crown Agents Bank then worked with Veriff to change the technology using customisation, which has resulted in what the company describes as a frictionless solution.
Another plus was the fact that Veriff allowed Crown Agents Bank to embrace technology combined with a human touch – its preference was always a solution that wasn’t all about tech.
We always wanted a human to be involved. That's why we love Veriff, because there is a human at the end of the process. What’s more, GDPR regulations state that you can't make a decision on a payment without having human intervention at some part in the process – so that's another driver for our partnership with Veriff.
What was the immediate impact of implementing Veriff?
Prior to partnering with Veriff, Crown Agents Bank was seeing less than satisfactory data in terms of user experience on the member side. It was seeing high abandonment rates, members having to complete the process several times and high numbers of calls coming into call centres as a result.
Crown Agents Bank then trialed two providers, with Veriff being one, within a proof of concept. An A/B test was conducted, and Veriff was selected off the back of this.
Crown Agents Bank’s original success metric was 20% digital uptake. This was very much surpassed to an 80-90% uptake rate, which the company describes as “phenomenal”.
“Today, as a result of the partnership, we experience an almost zero-abandonment rate, and the customer service that we’ve received from Veriff has been exceptional, too.
About Veriff
Veriff is the preferred identity verification partner for the world’s biggest and best digital companies, including pioneers in fintech, crypto, gaming, and the mobility sectors. We provide advanced technology, deep insights, and expertise from our foundation in digital-first Estonia and honed in leading the digital identity revolution. The partner of choice for businesses who need to rapidly and effortlessly verify online users from anywhere in the world, Veriff delivers the widest possible identity document coverage.
By supporting government-issued IDs from more than 230 issuing countries and territories and with our intelligent decision engine, which analyzes thousands of technological and behavioral variables, Veriff enables trust from the first hello.
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