Data capture, whether it be for regulatory purposes, staff enrollment, KYC (Know your customer), or data sampling has become an increasingly sought-after activity.
Companies and individuals are continually looking for solutions that can help them with data capture, with differing advantages to them.
But with some much data to collect, store and manage, organizations face a myriad of challenges— from adhering to compliance standards, to properly identifying and verifying an individual, to safety protocols for ensuring data is not breached or stolen.
How can innovative African companies utilize the right data capture solution that adequately satisfies the customer, governing bodies and the organization itself?
The Data enrolment problem – The need for KYC
Data enrolment or capture in simple terms is the process of capturing data manually or using an automated process into a repository.
Data enrolment is useful to different verticals in their unique ways. These are all key sectors with a critical need for customer enrolment.
Government parastatals for their staff and citizens, the banks and Telcos for their customers, security agencies for the elimination of ghost workers, identity fraud of all sorts, and all other identification-related issues.
For example, the government sector needs data enrolment to capture her staff to eliminate ghost workers or to easily identify and have a record of all her people in its populace.
The Telecommunication sector needs data enrolment to register her subscribers in a way that is compliant with Regulatory regulations, and largely for her use in marketing and general analysis.
The education and research need data enrolment for data sampling, data analysis, data filing, and the list goes on and on…
No gainsaying that the biggest essence of data capture is for Identity Management. Also, as technology has advanced in recent times, so also has the rate of fraud surged.
Fraud management Identification becomes difficult when there is no proper information of the people available (no identification). With this said, it is important for organizations to inculcate a data driven policy in their operations. Read here to find out how to do so in your company.
Biometrics security, Idea for E-KYC (electronic know your customer), Innovation technology against digital cybercrime.
Introduction to KYC
KYC means Know your customer— in other words, the capture of customers’ biometric and basic textual details for identification and verification purposes.
In Nigeria for instance, the KYC requirement was first introduced in the Telecommunication Industry sometime around 2007 where all Telcos were mandated to do a KYC exercise to their subscribers during SIM purchase and in 2011, extra compliance guidelines were put in place to ensure correctness and quality of such records captured.
This ensures that fraudulent, terrorist, or all forms of corrupt activities are easily tracked.
The Banking sector also introduced this KYC requirement in 2013 to ensure that Banks have the full details of their banked customers to ensure they could be identified.
However, the customer in this article goes beyond a bank account holder or a telco subscriber. Here we refer to anyone interested in the subject matter as a customer.
So for a local store owner, his/her customer will be those who purchase goods from that shop, for a company, her customers will be her employees who she wants to capture, for students and researchers, the customer will be data sample that needs to be enrolled, etc.
Since the introduction of KYC in Nigeria, every aspect of the populace has been affected positively.
Identity Management companies around the country have also focused on developing Biometrics and Data capture solutions utilized by various organizations to solve their KYC requirements.
Examples include the deployment of Seamfix’s BioSmart suite of solutions for MTN and Airtel for SIM registration exercise as well as for different state governments for the enrolment of their staff for ghost worker elimination.
Other solution providers have also focused on the education sector where different data capture solutions have been developed and deployed for WAEC, JAMB, NECO, registrations, etc
Problems with Enterprise KYC Applications and The Introduction of Cloud Data Capture (KYC as a Service)
Cloud computing technology and online data storage for business network concept.
The advantages of data capture and KYC to various organizations of all sizes are clear.
Yet the high cost of ownership for traditional enterprise KYC applications – ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to a few million – tend to make it difficult for many to acquire quality solutions to meet their objectives.
This is typically due to expensive license and support costs, as well as hardware infrastructure required to drive the sometimes heavy KYC systems especially when requirements include features like AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification) and Deduplication. There are also annual maintenance and support costs to be factored in.
For large organizations that require dedicated systems with heavily customized workflows and have the necessary capital, the enterprise KYC systems work well for them. However, other users and organizations need to find an alternative.
For example, a student whose final year project is to do a study of a particular species of crops or animals and requires a solution to manage his data capture would find the traditional enterprise KYC system out of his league.
Or maybe an FMCG company needs to do a below-the-line activation exercise or carry out a customer survey on a newly launched product and needs a solution to capture those that will be involved in the exercise.
As we will imagine, the objective will be to get a solution that will not cost more than what the exercise is expected to yield. After all, the capture is not the end goal, it’s just a means.
At this point, it becomes imperative that a new kind of solution is considered – KYC as a managed service offering also known as KYC-as-a-Service (KaaS).
KaaS is a method of delivering data capture services over the Internet as a cloud, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform thus ensuring that it is ready for use in a matter of minutes rather than months.
Kaas also has significantly cheaper costs as there are no upfront software license costs or infrastructure investments and require the least IT intervention from the customer’s end.
With KaaS managed service offering, the platform contributes all the necessary technology, processes, security, and data storage infrastructure with the technical expertise to seamlessly manage the KYC platform and guarantee availability.
This frees up the end-user or business to focus on the actual exercise of capturing their customer or subject data and utilizing it for their specific purposes. And as the client’s data capture needs grow, the platform scales smoothly to support the growth curve.
KAAS vs Enterprise Data Capture
Some of the advantages of KaaS over the traditional stand-alone/enterprise data capture solutions are:
- Comparatively cheaper, easily and securely accessible from the cloud, and easy to use.
- Fully customizable and dynamic: This means any individual or corporate can configure what needs to be captured according to their unique needs
- Guaranteed Service Levels: Typically KaaS service providers provide service Levels of up to 99% uptime, 24/7 with appropriate dedicated support channels and expert engineers maintaining the platform.
- Increased Productivity: You can focus on other aspects of your business and not worry about the headache of acquiring and maintaining a complex solution.
- Ease of Scalability: Cloud systems can typically be scaled to handle any volume of transactional load as per client requirements. Thus the client can start small, and increase according to need without downtime to the business.
BioRegistra as a best-in-class KAAS Solution for Organizations and Individuals
The world’s biggest organizations make decisions backed by real data. BioRegistra helps you create one of the world’s most flexible digital forms to collect just about any information required to grow your business anytime, anywhere.
BioRegistra is a Seamfix proprietary innovative and state of the art online KaaS platform developed primarily for individuals or business owners (Companies) worldwide to enable them to capture, validate and store any form of information.
With dynamic capture parameter configuration, robust integration APIs, data analytics, and report export functionality, BioRegistra can fit into a myriad of customer use cases and workflows.
For a case study, read here to see how Pension Fund Administrators use BioRegistra for KYC Biometrics Capture and this blog on how to solve your customer onboarding challenges using BioRegistra
To learn more, kindly visit the website, or Contact Us.
