Angel One's New Growth Phase Powered by HyperVerge’s AI-led Onboarding Solutions

Introduction

Angel One Ltd is an Indian technology-led financial services company providing broking and advisory services, margin funding, loans against shares, and financial products distribution to clients.

In 2023, Angel One Super App was launched to empower every Indian investor by delivering a seamless and technologically advanced experience (for investing and trading at all levels). It’s a one-stop-shop that offers online trading & investing, direct mutual funds, sovereign gold bonds, NCDs, etc. It caters to clients, including traders and investors, ensuring frictionless account opening and one-click bank updation. Speed, security, and reliability are the core attributes of the platform.

There is a renewed focus on the Indian youth from tier two and three cities, who are entering the fintech ecosystem for the first time. These customers value trust, which Angel One has built over the past 30+ years.

Collaboration and a productive approach are crucial to us. We, as tech product operation folks and business folks, engage with a potential partner with a focus on technical performance. This is where HyperVerge shines.

Prabhakar Tiwari

Chief Growth Officer, Angel One

Challenges Faced

As the company started to scale its operations, especially after the launch of the Super App, there was a need for a robust digital identity verification process that could meet all the compliance requirements on one hand, and yet be extremely convenient and user-centric on the other.

Compliance requirements

As a SEBI-regulated entity, Angel One adheres to multiple compliance requirements. The company strives to understand the reasoning behind each compliance requirement and takes necessary actions to safeguard its customers. Customer protection is a top priority for Angel One, but it is challenging since regulations are constantly evolving across different regions.

Low-bandwidth use-case

When expanding to tier 2 and 3 cities, any onboarding process must work even in low-bandwidth environments to cater to users with varying internet connectivity.

Reliability

Reliability is crucial for Angel One, as the platform involves users’ money when opening an account or using any retail booking app. The system’s robustness, low latency, and recovery/backup capabilities are critical factors that Angel One has extensive experience and expertise in addressing and solving at great speed.

Solution Implementation

The quest for a comprehensive solution led Angel One to seek credible technology partners with expertise in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), liveness detection, face match, and penny drop services.

Criteria for Partner Selection

Angel One prioritizsed technical performance, focusing on latency and turnaround times. HyperVerge emerged as a key player in addressing Angel One’s challenges. The initial scope of work involved implementing OCR, a critical foundation that laid the groundwork for collaboration. The seamless integration of liveness detection transformed a compliance checkbox process into a user-friendly experience.

Angel One’s product and tech teams worked with HyperVerge to enhance the UI/UX, ensuring a smooth onboarding journey for users. HyperVerge’s clear documentation and low API latency proved instrumental in facilitating a deeper understanding of the technology behind the scenes.

Thanks to HyperVerge and also to our internal product team, we have been able to make it a very, UI, UX-friendly, user-friendly process.

Prabhakar Tiwari

Chief Growth Officer, Angel One

Expansion of Collaboration Scope

For Angel One, trust is the foundation of any partnership. While initially aiming to improve customer experience in-house, the company realizsed the need for partnering with experts like HyperVerge.

HyperVerge’s consistent performance led to an expanded engagement, showcasing a strong working relationship. As Angel One expanded into discount broking, the engagement with HyperVerge deepened, incorporating face match, selfie liveness, and Penny Drop services – this improved identity verification at scale, enhancing efficiency and reliability.

Impact and Results

HyperVerge demonstrated proactive measures to align with changing compliance requirements. The collaboration yielded significant positive outcomes for Angel One. Turnaround times were reduced, and latency was minimizsed, leading to a more efficient verification process. The user-centric approach, coupled with the reliability of HyperVerge’s technology, contributed to an enhanced experience for Angel One’s users. With HyperVerge, they were able to see visible improvements in speed, accuracy, and overall operational efficiency.

For us, latency and turnaround time is important. And that’s where HyperVerge scored. And as we started with the initial service, the performance kept improving, and hence we started increasing the scope of our engagement with HyperVerge.

Prabhakar Tiwari

Chief Growth Officer, Angel One

Angel One found HyperVerge’s team to be collaborative, tech-savvy, and reputable, fostering a positive experience and ongoing collaboration. HyperVerge has consistently demonstrated its ability to understand problems deeply and provide newer solutions. The company seems adept at understanding customer problems and drilling down to resolve them. Angel One is happy that HyperVerge has fulfilled many expectations and now expects them to proactively solve problems.

Ongoing Partnership and Collaboration

The partnership between Angel One and HyperVerge is marked by a regular meeting cadence to understand HyperVerge’s services and ensure compliance. Close collaboration between Angel One’s product team and HyperVerge makes it easy to effectively track metrics, address user queries and drop-offs, enrich FAQs, understand dashboards, derive insights, build product roadmaps, and solve future problems. Weekly sync-ups are held to understand key compliances and address them effectively within deadlines.

HyperVerge takes a proactive approach to offering solutions, even before problems arise. The company is seen as a reliable partner that respects Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and has a responsive team.

They [HyperVerge] are reliable. They respect their SLA. The team is also very responsive in nature. So, this builds trust, which Angel One also values.

Rohit

Sr Product Manager, Angel One

Future Plans

As Angel One sets higher targets and numbers for the next fiscal year, they expect HyperVerge to collaborate and scale up to that level. Angel One recognizses the strategic importance of HyperVerge’s technology in their future plans. The partnership is expected to evolve further as Angel One continues its journey into newer geographies and businesses.

Recognizsing the importance of regulatory compliance in building investor trust and ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem, the company aims to maintain a constructive tension between businesses, the regulatory ecosystem, and partners like HyperVerge to ensure compliance while allowing for innovation and growth.

Looking ahead, Angel One and HyperVerge are evaluating additional features to make the KYC journey more seamless and easy, such as document fetching and the potential integration of HyperVerge’s CKYC (Central Know Your Customer) offering.

Conclusion

The partnership between Angel One and HyperVerge has been a driving force in enabling Angel One to navigate the challenges of scaling operations, ensuring compliance, and delivering an exceptional customer experience. Through close collaboration, shared values, and a commitment to innovation, this partnership has flourished, contributing to Angel One’s growth and success in the fintech ecosystem.