By Taryn Samet, Project Manager
Using mobile devices has become essential to carrying out our day-to-day activities – whether that’s checking into a flight, ordering food delivery, or placing a trade on the stock market. With the rise of social media and sharing photos and videos, the cameras on mobile devices have significantly improved, far exceeding the capabilities of my first smartphone, a Motorola Razr.
Today’s phone cameras are designed with image stabilization, high-resolution sensors, and autofocus, resulting in greater image quality and clarity. It’s rare to hear today that “the photo doesn’t do it justice.” However, not all cameras are created equal, and despite their widespread use, the cameras on laptops and desktop computers still leave a lot to be desired. Optimized primarily for video conferencing calls, the images they capture are often grainy, distorted, and out of focus.
One area where the limitations of these computer cameras is most apparent, and felt by everyday users, is the digital onboarding process.
First impressions matter, and users want an onboarding process that is fast, easy, and secure. Particularly in regulated industries like banking, financial services & insurance, the number of users that drop off (or abandon the sign-up process) before ever interacting with a product or service is consistently high – as high as 68% for financial services. That abandonment directly corresponds to how long and how friction-filled the process is to submit proof-of-identity documents.
Prior to COVID-19, 33% of bank customers used digital banking apps, while 24% used online banking via laptop or PC the most. During the pandemic, the frequency of digital channel use increased even further (44% mobile app, 26% online) while branch banking fell to 10%.
For example, imagine a person wants to open an online bank account. As part of online registration, a user will need to scan an identity document like a driver’s license or passport to verify their identity. For users registering on their computer, it’s often awkward to hold the identity document up to the camera, place it in what is believed to be the camera’s frame, and try to capture a high-quality image of their document to proceed with onboarding.
I can attest first-hand to the frustration of blindly trying to frame the document just right. For many individuals, this friction causes them to abandon the onboarding process altogether, resulting in lost customers and missed revenue.
Even if the person does successfully take the photo, it’s generally low resolution. In extreme cases, if it’s not legible, it might be rejected, forcing the user to begin again, increasing the likelihood that they abandon it altogether.
This is what makes me so excited about our BlinkID In-Browser 6.1 release! At Microblink, we take a UX and AI-first approach to solving these digital identity challenges for our customers so that we can deliver fantastic, frictionless experiences for end users.
With our award-winning device-to-device functionality, businesses who use BlinkID for fast and easy identity document capture and extraction can upgrade to version 6.1 and deliver a seamless, device-to-device experience.
This means that banking customers that prefer to register on a computer will no longer need to struggle with scanning their documents using their laptop or desktop camera. Instead, they can start the desired task there and then switch to their mobile device to scan the document. All without missing a beat or breaking the onboarding workflow.
For users, this is accomplished by simply scanning a QR code from their preferred phone device, which will generate a web address link allowing them to initiate image capture from their phone. From there, users can capture a high-resolution image of their identity document in a manner that is familiar to most – i.e., from their mobile phone. Once the image is captured, data is extracted, and results are sent to the initial desktop device where users are automatically returned to the laptop session to finish the onboarding process.
In a world where customer experience is key, this kind of seamless onboarding and attention to detail, inclusive of the variety of ways in which users interact with mobile and web applications, can set your business apart. Particularly in a high-touch, customer-centric industry like digital banking.
Concerned about user difficulties with camera quality on their desktop devices? Then we recommend you upgrade to our In-Browser v6.1 and try our new device-to-device feature! We have detailed technical documentation to walk your team through how to utilize this functionality. Not a current BlinkID customer, but need to capture and extract data from your customers’ identity documents with speed and accuracy? Let’s connect!
Taryn Samet is a Technical Project Manager at Microblink.
