inVOID Deploys its Verification Products Four Times Faster with the Help of AWS Managed Services

Founded in 2018, inVOID is a New Delhi based start-up offering digital identity verification and Know Your Customer (KYC) authentication services to businesses. Using Artificial Intelligence, inVOID helps businesses to remove the layer of manual tasks required in the traditional verification process, which could take up to five days. With inVOID, the verification process can now be done remotely and completed within one minute. Today, inVOID conducts over 15,000 KYCs a day across seven sectors in India, including finance, non-banking financial companies, cryptocurrency, gaming, education, online dating, and shared economy providers.

In January 2020, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced a new ruling to allow video-based KYC as an option for financial institutions to establish a customer’s identity. This was an opportunity for inVOID to penetrate the financial sector, where onboarding customers could take up to five days and incur significant costs—more than Rs. 200 (US$2.67) per customer—due to KYC norms and guidelines defined by the RBI.

When India went into a nationwide lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, banks could no longer conduct physical verification and onboarding. Faced with the risk of customer drop-offs, banks turned to digital KYC tools, such as those offered by inVOID, to conduct the onboarding and verification processes remotely. As a result, inVOID more than doubled the number of KYCs it conducts in a day—from 6,000 before the pandemic to over 15,000 currently.

Kunwar Raj, co-founder and chief executive officer at inVOID says, “Soon after the lockdown was announced, we were approached by one of India’s leading banks, which experienced a 50 percent customer drop-off rate, amounting to almost 30,000 customers. It needed an immediate solution to retain and onboard customers. Thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), we were able to deploy our KYC tools for the bank within three weeks, which otherwise would have taken them two to three months.”

In addition to the urgency to deploy digital KYC solutions, inVOID needed to meet a comprehensive list of regulatory and compliance requirements laid out by the RBI and its banking customers. For instance, some rules include:

• The audiovisual interaction must be triggered from the domain of the bank and not from a third-party service provider, which in this case is inVOID
• The activity log, along with the credentials of the officer performing the authentication or onboarding, must be preserved

inVOID turned to AWS to address the challenges faced by its banking customer. “We have been using AWS solutions since inception, and we knew that AWS has the expertise and resources for a successful and seamless deployment. The AWS team proactively consulted security and compliance experts, and helped us adapt our solutions to best suit the bank’s requirements,” says Sarthak Goel, co-founder and chief technology officer at inVOID.

inVOID uses AWS Managed Services to meet compliance requirements as well as to perform activities such as progress tracking. For enhanced security, it uses AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) and Amazon CloudWatch to secure and monitor its online environment. This feature is supplemented by in-house machine learning models to detect in real-time if there are any ID tampering or other fraudulent activities taking place, which could take up to three days when done manually. In combination with AWS Lambda, inVOID can immediately flag anomalous behaviour to the banks and the customer being onboarded or verified.

Goel adds, “AWS has been pivotal to our business success in the financial sector. Within a month, we have deployed our solution to over three hundred branches of the bank across India. With a scalable, customizable and RBI-compliant platform enabled by AWS, inVOID is in a strong position to acquire more customers in financial services.”

In the last few months, inVOID has seen a 250 percent growth in its revenue owing to the surge in the demand for digital KYC solutions. Its vision for the coming years is to reach over 200 financial institutions across India and extend services to customers in Southeast Asia. On the product side, inVOID is looking to enhance its capabilities in detecting forgery and fraudulent activities.