Exclusive interview with Rabobank on digital identity

Could you please explain Rabobank’s strategy behind becoming a Digital Identity Service Provider? And how does this relate to PSD2?

We see more and more of our clients pushing their businesses online, with a big demand from the market to support the online journey of users with our business clients (merchants). This is something that we have been doing for several years now. We have a lot of in-house functionalities for these journeys, and there is a demand to not only use them for our own business, but to also put them on the market. We have two reasons for doing this: firstly, it is in line with our strategy of helping and supporting business clients to do business, and secondly, it is a functionality we pay close attention to, due to all kinds of legislation that urges banks to invest in fraud detection, KYC processes, security, and in different kinds of tokens.

How does this initiative relate to iDIN (an online identification service developed by the Dutch banks and The Dutch Payments Association jointly)?

iDIN is a service we have developed in association with other banks, based on an agreement on sharing identity data and the quality of that data. If someone signs in with iDIN, we can be certain that the person is who they say they are, and this level of assurance is what a merchant expects from banks. What happened when Dutch banks brought iDEAL to the Dutch market is that Payment Service Providers, e.g. Adyen, Buckaroo, acknowledged that merchants not only wanted to offer iDEAL, but other payment methods as well.

The same thing is happening with identity, signing, and archiving; iDIN is a great solution if you want to make sure that the person you are dealing with in your online journey is who they say they are, but it is not the only solution you need if you do business online. Sometimes, you do not need to know who the customer is or the customer would like to be anonymous, in which case a Google or Facebook log-in could do. One wants to make it as simple as possible for the customer to go through the identification process. Furthermore, iDIN does not offer services like signing or archiving contracts, and because iDIN is not an all-encompassing service, there will be service providers that incorporate iDIN in a larger package. Together with our partner Signicat we started such a Digital Identity Service Provider under the name Rabo eBusiness.

Could you elaborate on your go-to-market strategy? What market needs will be fulfilled?

Our go-to-market strategy is to first introduce iDIN to merchants who face similar challenges in their online user journeys. We would like to bring the functionalities that we have as a bank to clients that are similar to us: insurance companies, energy, telecom, healthcare institutions, and financial services providers. We start with the largest ones, as their IT infrastructure and commercial organisation is at such a high level that they immediately see the advantages of using a service like this. This will create enough reach to the market for it to be commonly known that we offer this service, so that afterwards the service can be introduced to smaller clients, who are still in the development stage of their online interaction with customers.

Can you mention a specific use case for the solution?

All use cases revolve around conversion, risk reduction, and compliance. Take, for instance, the insurance company: one challenge is commercial conversion, or at least making sure that the user journey is as smooth as possible. That means that if a customer (user) wants, for example, a declaration of expenses, they want to be able to log in with a method they are accustomed with. iDIN would be a perfect fit for this as customers can use their familiar bank token to identify themselves. The company might also want to offer an insurance package fitted to the customer, in which case the user might not want to share their iDIN data, but use a social login like Google. In this case, the iDIN data will only be necessary once the customer has decided on a deal.

How well are banks positioned to sell identity services?

We, as banks, are normally very used to talking to the CFOs and treasurers of companies, not the commercial (or marketing) management and IT people, so we have to develop ourselves on that front. On the other hand, we do understand the decision-making processes well, as they are similar to the processes that banks go through. The first advantage is that we understand the business our customers are in, but we do have a challenge to develop on the sales side. In order to address this, we have trained a group of people within our company, who are more IT-savvy and know about the implementation of these processes with our clients, and combined them with the financial logistics teams, we go client by client to learn from the use cases we find.

It is in this process that Signicat, as a multiple identity markets provider, is a key partner in our engagement and implementation team. We cooperate with Signicat both by offering a platform to deliver identity and data services to merchants together, and by offering major identification services, such as Facebook, Google, and several signing solutions.

In the future, we see potential for growth in validation services for customers and keep looking for ways to help our users improve the way they do online business while keeping control of their data.

About Alexander Zwart

Alexander Zwart is a Senior Product Manager at Rabobank’s Digital Bank and responsible for the bank’s online channels, access management proposition and online monitoring. During the past 20 years, he has worked in fast moving consumer goods, energy & banking, in functional areas like Sales, Marketing, Strategy and IT & Operations. Alexander has been part of a business development team that started an energy company in Belgium and Germany and he has also worked as an advisor to Rabobank’s Executive Board.
 About Rabobank

Rabobank is an international financial services provider operating on the basis of cooperative principles. It offers retail banking, wholesale banking, private banking, leasing and real estate services. As a cooperative bank, Rabobank puts customers’ interests first in its services and is committed to being a leading customer-focused cooperative bank in the Netherlands and a leading food and agri bank worldwide. Rabobank Group is active in 40 countries.

 About Signicat

Signicat is based in Trondheim, Norway, and was founded in 2007; the company operates the largest Digital Identity Hub in the world, offering the only complete identity platform in the market and trusted to reduce the burden of compliance in highly regulated markets. With Signicat, service providers can build and leverage existing customer credentials to connect users, devices and even ‘things’ across channels, services and markets transforming identity into an asset rather than a burden. By ditching manual, paper-based processes and replacing them with digital identity assurance, customer on-boarding is accelerated and access to services is made simple and secure. Signicat’s Identity Hub is a complete solution to that offers compliance and a route to better customer engagement.