We’re excited to announce our newest enhancement to our onboarding software. We’ve added an “online money transfer” option that makes our account opening platform even easier for users and more efficient and profitable for our clients. Since thirdstream is the first onboarding company to offer a viable alternative to account funding in online onboarding, clients using cumulus will be among the first in the country to pass along this convenience to their customers or members.
One of the biggest barriers to online account opening is the need for the applicant to mail in a cheque, a necessary step to fund the account and verify the identity of the applicant. However, with cheque usage declining rapidly and the expectation for paperless online transactions increasing exponentially, requiring a cheque to open an account online is becoming an outdated practice. Not only does it alienate a growing pool of people who simply do not use cheques, it also creates friction and abandonment in the onboarding process. In early 2016, our product development team, led by Jeff Coomber, began investigating better ways to fund the account and verify identity.
Their efforts have led to a unique solution that removes the need for a cheque altogether. Referred to internally as “Online Money Transfers” (OMT), we have developed an added functionality that brings together instant account verification (IAV) and electronic funds transfer (EFT).
Coomber explains, “IAV is a way to authenticate that an applicant has an account at a Canadian FI by letting the applicant sign into that account during the cumulus onboarding process. cumulus uses that banking information to prepare an EFT file to transfer the initial deposit to the new account opened using cumulus. cumulus can also leverage IAV to pull back past banking transaction history from the selected account to provide data for multiple purposes including marketing and adjudication.”
The main advantage of our OMT is that applicants are no longer required to submit a cheque. Since IAV satisfies the Fintrac requirement for proof of a Canadian FI account, the applicant is free to use another method to fund the account. That is where EFT comes in. Using the IAV data to populate the EFT file creates a seamless and efficient experience for the user.
OMT will offer significant benefits to our current and future clients. Coomber says that “Cheque use is declining steadily, making alternative methods for funding the initial deposit increasingly important. Removing barriers that prevent people from opening accounts online provides a larger pool of applicants to join our FI clients.”
For more information or to view a demo of how OMT could work for your FI, contact Keith at 403-381-1360 or by email at keith@thirdstream.ca.