Zro Bank is a Brazil-based digital bank that offers various amenities for individuals and businesses alike across its banking platform. From allowing users to open checking accounts and pay their bills to giving them the ability to access their funds in any currency — including cryptocurrencies — Zro Bank is all about empowering individuals and organizations to manage their money in any way they choose.
Crypto can feel scary to those who have never managed this type of currency or invested in the space before. With Zro Bank, users can manage their funds and transfer between currencies, making crypto — and commerce in general — easy and more accessible to users around the world.
Problem: Zro Bank’s efforts to deter bad actors stymied its other goal of converting users quickly
As the first of its kind in Brazil, Zro Bank is paving the way for multi-currency banking with convenient money transfers that are safe for both businesses and individuals.
One of Zro Bank’s main goals is to give users a fast and easy experience and maintain high conversion rates. “As a business, we want to get as many users onboarded to the platform as possible and expand our reach into B2B services,” says COO Sergio Massa.
At the same time, to ensure the safety of its users, Zro Bank needed a way to fight bad actors trying to get onto its platform to commit financial crimes. “Our onboarding team’s goal is to stop fraud, make the platform as safe as possible, and know the users we’re letting in are who they say they are,” Sergio continues. “If you’re not careful with your onboarding process, users will use your system to launder money, move stolen money, use fake IDs, and more — people will really try anything to get through.”
To help mitigate fraud, Zro Bank began verifying users that needed to be manually reviewed by running their information against the Brazilian database integration, Serpro, which accesses the Brazilian Government Database that issues driver’s licenses to individuals in Brazil. Unfortunately, this iteration of its onboarding process was time-consuming and very manual — “on average, it would take our review team 10 minutes per individual. That adds up both for the user wait time and for the number of employees we need for the manual review process,” Sergio says.
Moreover, Zro Bank’s team spent a lot of time reviewing cases manually. “There are many rules that our compliance team is trained to identify, resulting in a long checklist of items to complete for manual review.” Sergio begins. “From alignment rules to signatures, our manual review process takes too long.”
To achieve its goals of maximizing conversion and ease of user experience while minimizing fraud, Zro Bank decided to look for a more automated, streamlined solution that would allow it to automatically check the Serpro database with no additional manual review. This way, if the data collected during the verification process matched the data in the database, the individual’s identity could be verified with no additional human eyes needed.
Solution: Zro Bank uses Persona’s integration with Serpro, a Brazilian government database, to verify users quickly with confidence
Persona partnered with Serpro to make it easy for Zro Bank to verify Brazilian driver’s licenses during its onboarding process, allowing it to simultaneously convert users and fight fraud efficiently. “At Serpro, we strive to transform the Brazilian state, improve the business ecosystem, and further enhance the relationship between the government and its citizens,” says Rafael Ferreira, head of internationalization and e-commerce at Serpro. “Allowing businesses and citizens to quickly and compliantly leverage our data and expand their impact helps us achieve our goal.”
With Persona, Zro Bank can easily collect the information about the individual it needs to conduct KYC and use the Serpro integration to compare it to the information in the Brazilian databases to verify the person is really who they say they are. “You can’t fake the government database. If the government wants to help prevent fraud and combat bad actors, companies will use their help. This makes it better for everyone in the financial market,” Sergio explains.
“We’re proud to partner with Persona to help their customers better fight fraud and protect Brazilian citizens from having their identities used for fraudulent purposes,” Rafael shares. “Identity theft, impersonation, and other means of fraud cost billions of dollars, hurting people's lives and increasing the cost of business. Serpro and Persona are aiming to reduce this impact on society and increase trust in all our customers' platforms and products.”
Results: With Persona’s Serpro integration, Zro Bank reduces fraud while maximizing conversion rates and keeping user experience top of mind
With the help of Persona’s integration with Serpro, Zro Bank has been able to better understand who its users really are, preventing fraud and helping it adhere to strict compliance regulations. Persona’s Serpro integration has benefited Zro Bank in multiple ways, including:
Ability to onboard more users
Prior to the integration, Zro Bank could not accept photos of IDs that were blurry or ones that didn’t capture the entire ID because the information was not legible and therefore could not be validated as a way of proving that the individual was who they claimed to be. With Persona’s Serpro integration, Zro Bank can quickly onboard more of these users.
Decreased need for manual review
The Serpro integration ensures that Zro Bank’s manual review team no longer has to go through as arduous a process for as high a number of individuals — not only saving the team time, but also giving users a more streamlined experience. Prior to the integration with Serpro, Zro Bank spent close to 2,100 hours of manual review time over the course of 4 months evaluating applications that were ultimately declined. Once the integration was in place, Persona was able to automate decisioning for ~60% of the potentially fraudulent users that were in Zro Bank’s review bucket, reducing manual review time by over 1,200 hours. This equates to approximately 7.5 total working days saved per week through this integration.
“Summing up Persona, it’s a very useful, all-around toolkit that allows us to automate our decisioning without having to build the tool ourselves,” Sergio remarks. “Our staff has full control over it, and it makes their job easier, especially for the manual review team.”
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