ZestMoney reduces customer onboarding time to 10 seconds using HyperVerge

INTRODUCTION

About ZestMoney

Founded in 2015 by fintech professionals Priya Sharma, Lizzie Chapman and Ashish Anantharaman, ZestMoney allows users to shop now and repay later in either 30 days, 3 or 4 months with 0% interest. The platform has a presence in over 75,000 physical stores and more than 10,000 online sites.

In 2021, ZestMoney recorded an upsurge in transactions by 300% with the number of millennial and Gen Z customer base rising by 2x and 3x respectively.

The Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platform raised $50 million in its Series C round led by Australian fintech firm Zip Co in September 2021.

CHALLENGES

For a country of the size of India – 1.3 billion people, the credit card penetration is very low – estimated at 60 million only in Dec 2021. What happens to a user who wants the immediate credit that a credit card provides but doesn’t have a card? Say, the user wants to buy a swanky new phone. ZestMoney serves this customer.

From the very beginning, the value proposition of Zest has been to offer credit to its users almost instantly or in near real time. Since it serves users who didn’t have credit history, Zest evaluates them mostly in a non-traditional way. However, all of this was being done manually.

The Problem

ZestMoney used to manually verify the majority of customers and this put a strain on its operations team. A manual review of a KYC document would take anywhere between 8-10 minutes for one case, because there are multiple documents and checkpoints to be validated.

With HyperVerge, ZestMoney customers who are being evaluated, the ones who are going through the onboarding funnel, don’t even realize that they are being evaluated.

Nikhil Joy

Head of Product

SOLUTION

ZestMoney chose HyperVerge to help them onboard and verify the customers as part of their KYC process.

Why was HyperVerge the preferred choice? 

According to Nikhil Joy, there were three primary factors which stood out about HyperVerge: its documentation, general API stack and excellent quality of service/support. The BNPL pioneer wanted a technology solution which works quietly in the background, something that is unobtrusive and almost invisible. That’s where HyperVerge fit the bill.

ZestMoney used document validation services offered by HyperVerge, specifically pertaining to C-KYC. So the entire process is as follows –  The customer gives consent to Zest to fetch their C-KYC documents. Then ZestMoney, using the HyperVerge API, checks whether the documents available in the C-KYC database are of an acceptable quality or not.

ZestMoney also used the other top features of the HyperVerge KYC stack – Facematch, Liveness and Match Fields. 

Match Fields help in identifying a “fuzzy match.” For e.g. Match Fields can tell that “Palm 822 Harrison Rd” and “822, Palm, Harrison Main Road” are the same. This is useful because the customer doesn’t always enter data exactly as printed on the ID document.

One thing about great technology is that it fades into the background. That is what HyperVerge lets us do.

Nikhil Joy

Head of Product

IMPACT

ZestMoney’s mission is to make life more affordable to millions of Indian consumers who have no access to credit. That too instantly. With HyperVerge, they’re able to do so with speed and accuracy.

Onboarding time reduced from 10 min to under 10 sec

By using HyperVerge validate API, ZestMoney was able to cut short the entire KYC process from 10 minutes to under 10 seconds. This helped the company in reducing operational costs—and scale up faster.

What would ordinarily have been a manual process of going through each document and validating, ZestMoney is now able to get to a 70% automated workflow with just 30% falling back on a manual review.