Topic starter
24/06/2026 8:07 pm
TL;DR: Slow identity verification is still delaying customer onboarding, with 1Kosmos citing Fenergo research that 70% of financial institutions lost clients in 2025 because onboarding was too slow, while manual reviews can take days and human error can reach 26%. The real issue is not weaker assurance but governance that treats verification as a queue instead of an identity lifecycle control.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by 1Kosmos: “How to Speed Up Customer Onboarding: Eliminating Manual Identity Checks”.
By the numbers:
- 70% of financial institutions in 2025 lost clients because of slow and inefficient onboarding processes, according to Fenergo research cited by 1Kosmos.
- Human verification has failure rates up to 26%, according to 1Kosmos.
Key questions
Q: How should fintech teams reduce onboarding friction without weakening identity verification?
A: Start by separating the fields that support a real control objective from the fields that only add inconvenience.
Q: Why do slow identity checks cause so much customer abandonment?
A: Because every extra step adds waiting, re-entry, and uncertainty to a process customers expect to finish quickly.
Q: What are the signs that an onboarding verification process is failing?
A: Common signs include accepting photocopied documents, failing to compare the face capture with the ID photo, and relying on only basic capture and OCR modules.
Practitioner guidance
- Instrument onboarding abandonment at each step Track where applicants exit the journey, which documents fail most often, and which verification step creates the longest delay.
- Replace manual document queues with automated proofing Use automated document scanning and real-time verification for standard cases, then route only exceptions to human reviewers.
- Add biometric liveness checks to remote onboarding Require a live capture that proves the applicant is present and matches the identity document.
Bottom line: Slow customer onboarding becomes a business risk when identity checks add enough friction to drive applicants away before verification is complete.
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25/06/2026 5:17 am
Identity proofing has become a conversion control, not just a compliance step: The article shows that onboarding delay now changes customer behaviour as directly as it changes control assurance. When applicants abandon the process, the organisation loses both the relationship and the regulated transaction. The implication is that identity governance has to treat proofing latency as a measurable business risk, not a back-office inconvenience.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will consider identity verification solutions unreliable in isolation because of AI-driven attacks.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When should identity verification teams use human review alongside automated checks?
A: Human review is most useful when automated checks lack confidence, such as poor lighting, damaged documents, older ID photos, or documents with complex security features. It also helps when organisations operate in regulated environments or need a higher assurance outcome. The practical approach is to treat automation as the default and human fallback as a control for ambiguous or high risk cases.
👉 Read our full editorial: Customer onboarding bottlenecks expose identity verification gaps