Success in Digital Finance: Doing Digital Identities Right for a Positive Digital Experience

Short Summary

Customer expectations are reshaping financial services: users tolerate less delay, expect mobile-first experiences, and face lower switching costs between traditional banks and fintech providers as alternative services gain legitimacy. This shift forces all market participants to deliver an end-to-end digital customer experience that spans onboarding, recurring authentication, and secure interactions and transactions, while also integrating smoothly with legacy banking systems. Despite rising expectations, many financial customer journeys remain cumbersome: onboarding still often requires physical presence; authentication relies on outdated mechanisms such as TANs, out-of-band codes, or even hardware OTP tokens; and document signing frequently involves printing, scanning, branch visits, or multi-step code exchanges.

Digital identity becomes the strategic lever for winning and keeping customer relationships, which directly determine revenue. In finance, the challenge is heightened by stricter regulatory demands and greater cyber-risk exposure than most other industries. Organizations must balance security and compliance with usability, while navigating requirements such as KYC, AML, and PSD2-driven Strong Customer Authentication, alongside evolving legal interpretations that can increase bank liability for fraud.

A coherent digital customer journey requires three tightly connected capability areas: electronic identity management, customer onboarding with KYC/AML compliance, and electronic trust services (e.g., signatures, seals, timestamping, validation, archiving). Because these areas depend on each other, the text argues against assembling many point solutions and recommends evaluating a central platform approach that can be extended with specialized components (such as video identification).

Oxyliom Solutions is presented as a provider of such an integrated offering through the GAIA Trust Platform, combining CIAM and trust services with modular components, standards-based integration, workflow support (BPMN), broad authentication options including biometrics, key management with HSM storage, and capabilities aimed at enabling paperless, compliant digital processes.

Interesting Facts

• Customers are developing a lower tolerance for time delays and transaction fees and require mobile-first interfaces as a baseline.
• Switching costs between traditional and fintech solutions are decreasing as non-traditional financial services increase legitimacy.
• Onboarding at traditional banks and insurers still often requires physical contact such as branch visits or broker meetings.
• Authentication and transactions commonly use TANs sent out-of-band or require hardware OTP tokens.
• Document signing can require printing, signing, and scanning documents or completing multi-step code-based flows via mail or SMS.
• KYC and AML regulations influence how onboarding and transactions must be implemented.
• PSD2 affects customer interactions through Strong Customer Authentication requirements.
• Video identification is used as part of regulated KYC processes.
• Integrated platform capabilities listed include electronic signatures, electronic seals, timestamping, validation, and archiving.
• Oxyliom Solutions is headquartered in Morocco with offices in Luxembourg and Dubai.

Notable Quotes

• “Customers today expect a consistent digital user experience across all types of services – seamless integration is the only way they accept such services.”
• “Customers bring the revenue – traditional banks and fintechs are fighting harder for that revenue than ever before.”
• “Serving the customer well is key to success for building stable customer relationships.”
• “Finding the right balance between security and regulatory compliance on one hand and a good user experience on the other is a challenge.”
• “Modern technology and strong standards support help businesses in succeeding.”
• “It is much easier to build on a central solution for digital identities and the digital customer experience than integrating a broad range of different vendor’s capabilities.”
• “Oxyliom’s GAIA Trust Platform comes with flexible integration capabilities into existing business and regulatory processes of banks.”
• “Success in digital finance starts with thinking from the perspective of the customer, not from the existing technology within the bank.”
• “Flexibility is key to success – allow the customer to act the way he or she wants, as long as security and regulatory compliance requirements are met.”
• “Success in digital finance is not a miracle, and both traditional banks and emerging fintechs can be successful.”