Leading Digital Lender Reduces Customer Screening Time by 90% with FOCAL

About the Company

This Digital Lending Provider symbolizes a new era of investment, driven by a team of technical, financial, and operational experts underpinned by the expertise and credibility of a leading Islamic investment firm. The platform serves as a hub for diverse investors seeking growth and financial prosperity.

Challenges Faced During the Onboarding Process

The provider faced significant challenges automating compliance checks for retail investors. Initially, compliance involved labor-intensive manual database screenings and Excel-based risk scoring, which was unsustainable for onboarding hundreds of users monthly. Their key challenge was efficiently automating these processes to maintain compliance and enable rapid onboarding.

Performance before implementing FOCAL

Optimizing Operations by Adapting Solutions for Peak

The digital lending provider addressed this challenge by implementing FOCAL's Monitoring, AML, and Risk Scoring solutions, alongside ID verification through FOCAL’s Yakeen integration. This strategic move towards automation was designed to alleviate the compliance burden and facilitate seamless onboarding for their target user base.

• Customer Screening: The compliance team saved time by automating watchlist checks, which now run in the background, eliminating the need for manual intervention.

• Customer Risk Scoring: The provider set their own parameters and risk scores, allowing FOCAL to automatically calculate the risk score for each individual onboarded without manual intervention. "Without FOCAL, we would have been required to manually enter fields in a workbook to calculate a risk score."

• Transaction Monitoring: The provider effectively monitored the flow in and out of the digital wallet, diligently identifying any irregularities or anomalies in behavior—a crucial capability for an investment application.

The Ease of Implementation and Integration‍

Integrating FOCAL with the provider’s backend database streamlined compliance procedures. FOCAL’s APIs enabled seamless user onboarding and automated screening, swiftly empowering them to approve or reject users based on predefined criteria.

Performance after implementing FOCAL

• 99% reduction in onboarding time (reduced from 5+ days to minutes)

• 240x faster user processing time (for 5,000+ users,)

• ~2,000 hours of manual work saved annually

FOCAL's risk scoring module categorizes users by risk level—low, medium, or high—and deals with each accordingly. This approach allows the provider’s compliance team to adopt a more strategic rather than tactical perspective. Integration challenges were promptly resolved thanks to FOCAL’s customer success and product teams. The collaboration between FOCAL and the digital lending provider seemed like one cohesive team working towards a solution.