Royal Bank of Canada is eyeing additional efficiency gains as it looks to expand its remote identity verification and onboarding tools across new business lines and ID types.

The $1 trillion Toronto-based bank developed technology in March 2020 that allows the bank to remotely identify and onboard personal banking and SMB customers. Now, it’s looking to migrate all account opening to the new workflow and grow the tool’s use to handle onboarding for other business lines while also expanding the types of IDs the verification tool recognizes, said Rami Thabet, vice president of digital products at RBC.

“We have a singular digital stack that really brings together our digital capabilities across advisors and clients, including the mobile app,” Thabet told Bank Automation News, adding that infrastructure supports three modalities of account opening: in the branch with the advisor, working with an advisor remotely or completing the task themselves.

With the new tech, the account opening process time was reduced as much as 70% in the past year, and the bank is betting on additional capabilities in remote ID verification to bring the time savings down even more, Thabet said.

To open an account, customers scan their government ID and take a selfie. RBC verifies the authenticity and legitimacy of the ID and confirms the identity of the person by using enhanced capabilities and the bank’s patented technology. The workflow of next steps and data gathering varies and is tailored to the various account types, which require different information and interactions, he added.

Currently, the technology is used by mortgage specialists, financial planners, branch advisors, and investment and retirement planners, but the bank is looking to expand the usage of the remote onboarding and verification tech across the enterprise, “whether that is credit cards, mortgages, investment products, or business accounts,” Thabet said. He didn’t specify which business lines will launch first, but noted that RBC launches new automation capabilities on a quarterly basis.

On the remote ID verification side, RBC is expanding to include new types of government IDs, like passports from outside Canada and the U.S., and electronic passports, so as to support the expected growth of the tool as it is extended across the company.

Remote identity verification and onboarding have become crucial in the past year as the coronavirus pandemic has kept people from banking in branches. Microsoft’s newly launched cloud services for banks automates parts of the retail lending process and offers self-service tools to support customer onboarding across various channels, while HSBC Bank launched a similar remote onboarding tool backed by biometrics for international customers in August.

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