WorkApps’ Video Platform Reduces Bank Customer Verification Time from Days to Seconds

During his tenure in the financial services industry, Rudrajeet Desai, chief executive officer at WorkApps Product Solutions (WorkApps), witnessed inefficiencies in business processes ranging from credit verification to insurance claims settlements. For example, the loan application process in India is time-consuming—applicants are required to meet with a credit officer in person, to discuss the terms of the loan and share physical documents for verification.

There was an opportunity to streamline the workflow and make customer interactions more effective by automating manual processes. Determined to solve this, Rudrajeet shares, “One day, it came to me. We can “videofy” the process,” a phrase that is now imbibed in the company’s mission.

He adds, “With a secure video-integrated digital solution, the loan application process can be done remotely—a video call, where applicants can also share digital documents for verification, and instantly find out the outcome of the application. The same approach can be applied to multiple use cases across the industry.”

Founded in 2017, WorkApps strives to improve collaboration and communication for organizations within India’s financial sector, through the use of video-based messaging tools.

Rudrajeet and his team identified 14 other key business processes which could benefit from a similar video-based workflow. These included credit verification, loan and health advisory, online customer support, and video medical examination report, among others.

To turn Rudrajeet’s ‘videofy’ concept into reality, WorkApps used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build its enterprise-grade messaging product.  While designing and developing the product, WorkApps adopted AWS’ best security practices to meet security, regulatory, and compliance requirements of financial services institutions.

WorkApps also benefits from using AWS Lambda, a serverless service, to run its code. This allows the company to focus on its core business goals as server provisioning and its management are now automated. Furthermore, the features of AWS Lambda enables WorkApps to automatically scale the messaging platform to perform its customers’ preferred processes any number of times, in line with customer demand.

Utilising Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which holds a resizable compute capacity, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a highly available and scalable object storage service, WorkApps is able to meet its customers' requirements for high scalability with ease.

Rudrajeet says, “AWS has enabled us to tap into a niche opportunity within the financial sector, and offer our customers greater value and convenience. Our video-based messaging platform is highly secure, flexible, and can be deployed in less than a week. Not only have we removed inefficiencies in business processes, we’ve also created a solution that can seamlessly integrate in any organization within the financial sector, including banks, non-banking financial companies, insurers, and other fintech organizations.”

With AWS, WorkApps is able to offer its customers the convenience and choice to digitalize any or all of the 14 processes and tailor the messaging platform to best suit its requirements.

Throughout its growth, WorkApps stayed attuned to its customers’ pain points and uncovered more business processes to digitalize. Similar to the loan application process, customer onboarding in banks could take up to two days, as it required physical verification of the customer's identity.

However, in January 2020, the Reserve Bank of India announced a new ruling to allow financial services organizations to use video-based Know Your Customer (KYC) verification services—an opportunity which WorkApps was able to quickly seize, having developed a solution strongly rooted in video.

The team promptly incorporated Amazon Rekognition, an image and video analysis tool, providing its customers with the ability to verify customer identities in near real-time. This process would take over 48 hours if completed in person or manually. With Amazon Rekognition, WorkApps’ platform can detect faces within a video frame and verify against their Aadhaar, a government-issued identification document, or passport, with a high degree of accuracy and within two to three seconds.

Implementing the video KYC feature within its platform gave WorkApps a business edge during the pandemic. When India went into lockdown, the demand for digital KYC tools spiked as banks turned to digital onboarding and verification processes for business continuity. Running on AWS made WorkApps’ platform highly compatible with over 80 percent of its customers, who also built their infrastructure on AWS. The integration was therefore much faster, allowing WorkApps’ customers to implement video KYC within a week, down from 3 months.

Rudrajeet adds, “During the lockdown period, we were conducting 40,000 KYCs a day, and today, we have captured 80 percent of the market share for video KYC—all thanks to our early decision to go all-in and build our platform on AWS.”

“The fact that the Reserve Bank of India reached out to us to co-author an industry whitepaper on leveraging video technology within the sector is further testament to the potential of Video-as-a-Service tools. We are more confident than ever that we have what it takes to venture into other sectors as well.” concludes Rudrajeet.