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NextGen.Net is unveiling a new digital identity verification service that will rapidly accelerate the application process for brokers, lenders and borrowers.
Announcing the launch of 'NextGenID', NextGen.Net Chief Customer Officer Tony Carn describes it as “a breakthrough moment at an industry-wide level”.
“The online verification of an applicant’s identity is a friction point for customers, brokers and lenders alike,” says Carn.
“We’ve worked very hard as an industry to create highly standardised approaches for many things. Of course, everyone differentiates themselves on key factors such as price, product and credit policy, but verification of identity is not a selling point. It’s a requirement.”
Traditionally, verifying the identity of applicants has been a tedious, paper-based process with a reputation for creating missing information requests and delaying application approvals.
“NextGenID introduces the opportunity for the industry to embrace an easier approach to identity verification,” Carn says.
As more transactions move online, remote verification of identity is a key step in an efficient and compliant process for meeting customer expectations and ensuring lenders keep pace with competitors.
COVID-19, which virtually jettisoned face-to-face interactions, has increased the use of VOI apps and added yet another dimension to the need for a better and unified approach.
“With NextGenID, we can harmonise identity verification by simply integrating it into the application process,” says Carn.
The NextGenID tool enables a broker to send a request to an applicant for identification requirements from within ApplyOnline. Using optical character recognition and biometric scanning, applicants can securely capture their identity documents and complete a liveness test using any device within a minute.
Carn explains that NextGenID not only verifies a customer’s identity, it verifies that the identity documents are current and legitimate.
In 2019, NextGen.Net became an authorised gateway provider for the Australian Government’s Document Verification Service.
“That data function is integrated into NextGenID. So not only do we verify the customer’s identity, we validate their identity documents against a range of national and state-based databases,” says Carn.
Using NextGenID, verification of identity is entirely automated and provides an instant result within seconds, giving brokers real-time updates when authentication is complete and delivering a full identity compliance report to activated lenders.
“Notably it’s also about the validation of a customer’s consent to a lender,” Carn emphasises.
“This changes the whole game regarding brokers being better equipped to embrace next generation technology and tools provided to them by lenders via their ApplyOnline applications.
“Cost and time to yes, both major bugbears, are all about lenders having to go back to the broker and ask for more information, most frequently regarding identity issues.
“Why this is so exciting is because NextGenID eradicates that.”
Carn says NextGen.Net’s mission is to make lending easy for all participants in the lending value chain, from lenders to aggregators and brokers, and ultimately end-customers – borrowers.
“Our mission is for lenders to have a much lower reliance on supporting documents, and to eradicate reworks,” he says.
“NextGenID means a lender doesn’t have to ask for copies of a driver’s licence or a passport, or use a separate non-integrated app; instead, we give them all the validation they require in one place.
“Not only does that eliminate cost for the lender, it also drives out prolonged time to approval – both of which are major pain points.”
By fully automating and integrating the verification of identity into ApplyOnline, NextGenID will save significant time for brokers and lenders and reduce turnaround times while also delivering an improved and impressive experience for a borrower.
“NextGenID streamlines the identification process for all users, providing speed and convenience while protecting the privacy of borrowers and insuring against fraud. Importantly, it enables lenders to empower brokers through an increasingly integrated process.”
