In the event of new customers, prospective borrowers must be properly identified. In 2020, Bondora employed the services of Onfido, a trusted online KYC and AML compliant identity verification service.
Bondora uses the identification methods it deems most effective. At present, Bondora employs one or more of the following three methods:
- (i) nominal payment, which involves the withdrawal of at least 0.01 in local currency from a customer’s bank account;
- (ii) electronic identification, where the customer is asked to log in to an existing online third-party bank account and the customer identity information provided by the third-party bank is checked against the registration information provided by the customer; or
- (iii) manual identification, where scanned copies of the prospective customer’s identification documents and bank statements are manually checked by Bondora. Because the anti-money laundering regulations applicable to banks are normally stricter than those that apply to the consumer credit business, Bondora frequently relies on the anti-money laundering check that was performed by the customer’s bank prior to the account being opened.
The applicant is subject to five different identification checks during the identification process:
- Email address verification
- Mobile number verification
- ID verification
- Address verification
- Bank account verification
To spot potentially fraudulent borrowers, Bondora employs its fraud detection policies and models to evaluate the data collected during these checks.