How Remitly Uses Behavioral Analytics to Foster Consumer Satisfaction

Remittances are an essential piece of the global economy, with such payments to low- and middle-income countries having reached $540 billion by the end of 2020. Many of these funds are applied to living expenses such as groceries or housing, making any delay in the transaction process potentially crippling. It is therefore essential for digital remittance services to provide a seamless customer experience, and it is equally important for these platforms to gain users’ trust and satisfaction.

This requires that the platform successfully differentiate between legitimate customers and bad actors, Matt Oppenheimer, co-founder and CEO of remittance and payments service Remitly, said in a recent PYMNTS interview. Remitly offers its services to consumers across Asia, Africa and Latin America and allows recipients to access their funds via bank accounts, mobile wallets or cash pickup at brick-and-mortar locations.

Preventing bad actors from gaining entry is key to providing the seamless consumer experiences its legitimate customers expect as well as successfully granting them the peace of mind they need to move their money, Oppenheimer said. This is where technologies such as behavioral analytics can come into play.

“I think that there is a theme within money transmission — and specifically, international money transmission — that there is a lot more complexity [to it] than meets the eye,” he said. “We have to delineate between who are good customers and who are bad actors trying to use our platform.

“We use behavioral analytics to do exactly that, to delineate between good customers [who we] want to let use our platform and any bad actors [to prevent] them from using the platform.”

Making that distinction is essential for the platform to run smoothly and create trusted and engaging customer relationships, especially as using digital channels for such payments is increasingly becoming the norm.

Tapping Behavioral Analytics for Customer Satisfaction

Trust is essential when it comes to moving money, especially in the world of remittances, where a significant portion of the funds being sent are going toward necessary living expenses. It is also key to ensuring platforms can provide experiences their users find satisfactory and seamless, meaning platforms must provide a quick and easy customer experience while also ensuring the identities of these customers are accurate.

Collecting customers’ personal data via behavioral analytics is one way platforms can accomplish both goals. They can tap this information to create a more personalized experience for the customer, improving satisfaction and possibly conversion, while also using such information for added security.

“By collecting and logging all of that data, we can improve the customer experience by letting good customers have very seamless experiences, and then we can prevent bad actors from using our platform,” Oppenheimer said. “[There are] countless pieces of behavioral analytic data that we are using to make sure that, ultimately, … customers, especially new customers that we might not know as well, are able to get through our transaction flow, including funds being dispersed all the way from going to our app for the first time, to entering in their information to their payment profile, giving us funds and then having those funds delivered.”

Immigrants living abroad are often more wary of sharing too much of their personal information online, Oppenheimer added. Any delay in sending such funds becomes a severe point of friction for the sender and recipient, but asking consumers to complete manual identity checks or reviews can also hurt customers’ views of the company as a trusted intermediary.

“The minute that you have a systematic issue around reviews or surprises post-transaction of like, ‘Sorry, need additional information, your funds are now going to be delayed,’ … it’s a really bad customer experience, because [other platforms] don’t use behavioral analytics,” he explained. “We do it in a way that preserves that great customer experience and therefore builds a brand of peace of mind.”

Behavioral analytics allow companies to circumvent these frictions by enabling platforms, such as Remitly, to develop robust digital profiles of their users to better determine their legitimacy without the need for manual identity verification. This capability became even more critical while enabling swift remittances during the global health crisis.

Behavioral analytics can provide critical benefits both for consumers and for trusted platforms, but one of the essential elements of such solutions is the collection — and subsequent use — of larger and larger collections of data. Keeping an eye on data privacy preferences and needs is also becoming critical for remittance companies and other services.

Behavioral Analytics and Data Privacy

Conversations surrounding data privacy — and its importance when providing a satisfactory experience for customers across various services — have cropped up on a global scale as more aspects of daily life are handled via virtual channels. Remitly has a dedicated data privacy team and a fraud prevention team, Oppenheimer noted.

“I think it’s really important that organizations focus on data privacy — customers expect that, we expect that,” he said. “It goes back to building that trusted brand and peace of mind with customers.”

It is unclear how data privacy and security requirements will shift in the next few years. Keeping pace with changing data privacy needs and what consumers expect from the companies that collect and handle their information should be a key goal for companies moving forward.