Bank Millennium is a digital-first bank based in Poland. Striving to become the most personalized bank in Poland, Bank Millennium uses the latest technologies and the best banking traditions to successfully compete in all segments of the financial market. The company’s biggest priority is to create an easy, convenient, and intuitive process for clients to access their financial service data.
The Challenge
Tomasz Brzostowski, Head of Digital Sales at Bank Millennium, was tasked with creating a more customer-centric approach and a seamless process for onboarding new clients. As a traditional bank, the company’s main process of opening new accounts was through in-person meetings at local establishments. Brzostowski sought a new way of allowing prospective clients to open accounts online.
In order to make this transition, the bank needed to follow Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance regulations. This meant that the company would need to verify new clients before they opened an account. At first, Brzostowski and his team built this identity verification tool internally but quickly came to realize that it was taking too much time, resources, and money to verify new clients.
Tomasz Brzostowski, Head of Digital Sales, Bank Millennium
Solution and results
The Bank Millennium team reviewed many external vendors to help provide ID verification solutions and ultimately went with Onfido for identity verification. Brzostowski explains that Onfido stood out due to the cost-savings and the seamless customer experience offered.
Now, when a new Bank Millennium client goes online to open a bank account, Onfido prompts them to submit a Polish ID document. Onfido will then do a verification on the document and ask the customer to take a video of their face. Finally, Onfido will verify the document, check that the face on the ID document matches the face in the video by running a Known Faces check. Known Faces automatically compares faces in selfies and videos against those that have previously passed through Bank Millennium’s onboarding system, and flags if the face has been seen before — giving them an extra line of defense against sophisticated repeat fraud.
By implementing Onfido, Bank Millennium has seen cost savings from moving away from their in-house verification tool. Now, there is little to no need for manual verification checks and all new verifications are completed within 5 minutes.
Recently, Bank Millennium was recognized as “The Best Digital Bank” in Poland and Brzostowski credits Onfido with helping make this happen.
What’s next?
Moving forward, Brzostowski and the Bank Millennium team are looking into expanding their use of Onfido products such as Studio and Motion to have higher clear rates and automate even more of the client onboarding process. Additionally, Bank Millennium will be adopting Near Field Communication, allowing Onfido to extract information from the documents chip rather than relying on a photo. The expected outcome is an improved user experience with higher clear rates, improved fraud detection and quicker results. Onfido is also working with the Bank Millennium team to support more government issued documents in Poland.
Thanks to this strong relationship, Brzostowski is a part of Onfido’s customer advisory board program and will continue to provide valuable feedback on our product roadmap.
