Visa Partners With Prove for Faster Customer Onboarding

Identity verification firm Prove has teamed with Visa to speed up customer onboarding.

The partnership, announced Wednesday (May 10), gives Visa clients access to Prove’s Pre-Fill identity verification solution, which lets customers opt into pre-filling registration forms.

“Today’s consumers expect signing up for a new account to take just seconds — any slower than that, and many abandon,” Prove CEO Rodger Desai said in a news release.

“We’re delighted to be partnering with Visa to put powerful technology into the hands of more merchants and their customers. Our vision is to extend these capabilities into more consumer experiences to add trust to the digital economy.”

According to the news release, FinTechs, banks and merchants use Pre-Fill to “reduce fraud, deter abandonment during the registration process, and increase revenue by pre-populating application forms with verified and authenticated information.”

“Auto-filling enrollment forms with such enhanced and enriched data, and always with consumer consent, supports fraud prevention while also enhancing the customer experience by simplifying and streamlining it,” the company added.

Jack Funda, senior vice president at Visa, noted that the partnership will let his company help “merchants and other brands grow their loyalty membership quickly and securely.”

PYMNTS looked at the difficulties companies face in onboarding potential customers late last year in a conversation with Gareth Walker, global head of client and digital onboarding at Refinitiv, a British business and financial markets data and infrastructure provider.

He pointed to data showing that 68% of customers abandoned a financial services application in 2021, a figure that was higher — more than 70% — among millennials and Gen Z customers.

Grasping those obstacles is even more crucial because 52% of customers say they’d be less likely to use a company service if the onboarding process is perceived to be poor.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke recently with Steve Durney, vice president of strategy at Prove, about how companies can use digital identity to differentiate themselves while generating added revenue by improving the customer experience. However, he noted that there are some challenges as daily commerce happens more and more online.

“The old joke,” he said, “is that secure and fast are not friends, and they’re not great dance partners. You wind up sacrificing one for the other.”

Any time users try to get through a barrage of online screens to make a payment or to onboard themselves to set up a loyalty account, said Durney, those journeys come with a lot of friction.

The challenge at the enterprise level, he told PYMNTS, is to balance security and convenience so consumers complete those onboarding and verification activities while businesses keep their top-line momentum intact.