Could you share with our readers what is LOQR, the idea that triggered the foundation of the company and the problems in the industry it is striving to solve?
LOQR’s is most known to be a Customer Onboarding Management Platform created to manage the complete process of the customer onboarding workflow for banks,?financial services and any other highly regulated verticals.?So, by using LOQR’s platform our clients can build their own customer-centric and compliant onboarding process. We provide, via an omnichannel approach, all the tools that support the?different phases of each specific workflow for their different products. This includes data acquisition, customer due-diligence (with KYC and Identity AML), legal documentation (with digital contract signing), account setup (core services integration, including legacy) and post onboarding relationship management.
The idea behind LOQR is to build a platform where non-IT companies can design digital processes, new or by migrating existing paper base ones, without worrying about technology. Ultimately any process that needs somehow customer intervention, our clients should be able to design it and make available through our platform, as the platform will be responsible to fill the technological gaps.
Why is digital identity/identity verification an important topic for 2019? From your point of view, who will be in the lead in getting digital customer onboarding right, banks or fintechs?
Banks and other financial services providers are now facing tougher compliance laws making compliance mandates much more numerous and complex. Complying with PSD2, GDPR, 5AML, and other specific regulations requires additional and reliable Identity Verification (IDV) investment and improved strategies.
Fintechs are, normally, IT companies working or providing services in the financial world. Using this as a start point it will be easier and more natural for them to get the user experience in the customer onboarding, or any other development, right from the start. They are also quicker on making changes after receiving feedback.
How can banks and other regulated service providers improve their onboarding process?
That’s easy; by partnering with technology companies that offer a complex dynamic and scalable state-of-the-art technology stack, with multiple agile teams, where legacy is only used to refer to decades of knowledge. For instance, LOQR works daily with programs such as React, Swift, WebRTC, Node JS, Spring, redis, Grafana, Terraform, Kong, Kubernetes and Docker, just to name a few, which are unknown terms inside the traditional used stacks by banks and other regulated service providers. If you want to deal with today’s expectations of your customers, you must deliver the same user experience they are used to see and feel in the other day-to-day services they use, being social media, streaming or e-mail. For that you must not only, use the same technologies, but also evolve at a similar pace.
LOQR, as an IT product company focus precisely on that and allows banks and other regulated service providers to focus on their core services which, normally, are not around developing technology.
Do different KYC requirements within Europe have any sort of impact on organisations when it comes to identity verification?
Yes, it has. Organisations working in more than one European country will need to comply with these different regulations. For instance, one of our clients – a bank – with operations in Portugal and Spain needs to comply with different regulations for remote account opening (e.g. the video verification part of the customer during the onboarding process in Portugal requires an assisted video interview, while in Spain it doesn’t). Our platform provides the compliant path for both realities, making the processes easier, but in a more normal and traditional approach they would need to do different developments for each country augmenting costs and time-to-market.
Congratulations on your startup pitch at the MoneyLive event in March 2019! Could you please share with our readers what this experience meant for your company, business-wise? What advice would you give novice startups who want to make a successful pitch?
Our growth during 2019 will be, strategically, majorly done through Spain. Our platform is ready to comply with the specific regulation of both Spain’s and the ones from the EU, as we just got our first customers in the banking and financial services sector. We expect that our participation in the MoneyLive event in Madrid brings additional visibility for us across our potential clients. We have made very good contacts and are now proceeding with the follow ups. We believe business will be made.
For the novice startups pitching in these events always remember less is more. Don’t try to say everything in such a short time slot. LOQR pitches, as you know, focus only in about 10% of what we do. You should only pitch enough to seed the curiosity among the ones listening and bring them to a more detailed and meaningfully conversation.
About Ricardo Costa
Ricardo has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and started his professional activity in 2001 in the financial sector. Most recently he was also a senior researcher crossing Artificial Intelligence with Privacy, Security and Identity Management. Currently he is Founder and CEO at LOQR and Professor at Polytechnic of Porto.
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