June 2022

BFSI

Third-Party Due Diligence: EDD, AML Checks and Ongoing Monitoring

Businesses rely on numerous third parties for the smooth running of key operations, increase profitability, and go to market faster. Third-party stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, dealers, distributors, vendors, and merchants play an integral part in managing different functions of the supply chain. With the help of third parties, businesses can overcome the complexity of supply chain functions, fill the gaps for smoother operations, and expand channels to customers.

Unfortunately, third-party vendor relationships come with unforeseen risks and vulnerabilities and can expose a business to reputational, regulatory, and financial risks. Establishing a robust technology for due diligence and continuous monitoring is essential to assess hidden risks at an earlier stage and mitigate them with various risk assessment techniques.

What is Third-Party Due Diligence?

Third-party due diligence often involves putting various levels of checks and balances within your new vendor, supplier, or any third-party onboarding journeys. This process usually involves onboarding contract review, vendor-completed assessments, and external intelligence. All of this is weighed against your organization’s level of risk tolerance.

A comprehensive due diligence process enables businesses to accelerate vendor onboarding while mitigating the possibility of any information insufficiency.

Types of third-party risks in supply chain networks and how to mitigate them?

We have identified five major types of supply chain risks along with the risk mitigation techniques.

Informational Risks

a. What are informational risks?
When onboarding vendors and third parties, it is crucial to collect relevant information and documents for identity validation and ensure all the information provided is correct in the first place. Most third parties have access to privileged and highly confidential data, such as financials, customer information, or intellectual property. In case there are un-vetted third parties in the system, there are high chances of a data breach as they have access to sensitive information or systems.

b. How to mitigate them?
Conducting due diligence of third parties with AI-backed technologies like biometric identification, image recognition, and liveness detection makes much more sense to validate individuals in real-time and mitigate informational risks. Businesses can validate ID documents with no hassles via OCR ensuring automated form filling and converting physical documents into digital. Some of the top key checks i.e. KYC/KYB checks, document validation, business ID verification, national ID verification, and much more help prevent informational risks, validate third parties, and identify stolen IDs, and forged documents.

Operational Risks

a.What are operational risks?
The rise of third-party relationships has increased operational risks across various functions, delivery channels, and processes as businesses don’t have the direct control and visibility of the third-parties activities. Operational risk is the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people, or systems. Cumbersome verification processes delay the onboarding of third parties and create difficulties for the businesses to perform their daily operations. Sometimes third parties are unable to serve what they promised earlier, creating troubles in the smooth business functioning. Thus, it is mandatory to have a robust due diligence solution in place to ensure real-time verification, seamless onboarding, and continuous monitoring to eliminate the scope of operational risks.

b.How to mitigate them?
Our digital address verification combines image recognition, GEO-tagging coordinates, and liveness detection technologies to verify the identity and physical address from their smartphones and enable identity verification in real-time. Continuous risk monitoring can empower businesses with the right security metrics and identify third-party risks before they become problematic. This also helps streamline remediation efforts and take a decisive call specific to each third party.

Financial Risks

a.What are financial risks?
Any misconduct by unvetted third parties not only hampers the reputation but also incurs financial charges or penalties – impacting your business standing in the marketplace. Some of the top financial risks are Market Risk, Credit Risk, Operational Risk, and Legal Risk. It is crucial to evaluate whether an individual/business partner is a good prospect or in any financial trouble.

b.How to mitigate them?
Businesses can mitigate financial risks with Know Your Customer/Know Your Business (KYC/KYB) checks, Anti-money laundering checks, high-risk EDD, ongoing monitoring, PEP checks (Politically Exposed Persons), risk scoring, and criminal watchlist checks. Conduct financial checks to determine bank account authenticity, GST number verification, financial standing, or any active mortgage/satisfied charges.

Reputational Risk

a.What are reputational risks?
Reputational risk is related to the image/perception of your company in the marketplace. Any misconduct by a third party can put the reputation of your business in dire straits. Reputational risks also occur when businesses have an association with a third party who has a history of violating rules and regulations or data breaching of sensitive information.

b. How to mitigate them?
Businesses must conduct reference checks to get a detailed report of financial stability, reputation aspect, linked associations, any sanctions/criminal history and stay protected from reputational risks. They must leverage insight-driven business intelligence platforms to enable risk assessment and choose genuine third parties, and business partners. With the help of customizable workflows, easy plug-and-play APIs, and comprehensive reporting, businesses can streamline the entire due diligence process and conduct risk analysis in just a few clicks.

Regulatory Risks

a. What are regulatory risks?
Regulatory risks arise due to a change in laws and regulations that could potentially cause business loss or violations of existing ones. These risks often result from insufficient control systems, lack of due diligence, and human error. Such risks can expose your business to various damages such as legal penalties, voided contracts, loss of opportunities, and reputation.

b. How to mitigate them?
Some acts and regulations must be taken into consideration for the due diligence of third parties. The rules and regulations differ from industry to industry. Some that span across industries are IT ACT 2000, FCPA, FDA, FASSI, and EIDAS. Businesses must prioritize third-party due diligence considering these regulations to safeguard themselves from regulatory and illegal financial problems.

Isn’t it surprising that your business is prone to risks at various levels? Wondering what are the top checks to mitigate third-party risks?

How are AuthBridge’s third-party due diligence solutions helping various industries?

Know Your Customer

We have optimized various B2C, B2B, and B2B2C onboarding processes for our wide range of clients across 30 industries with the help of our platform – OnboardX. We have successfully mitigated the informational, reputational, and regulatory risks with our 117+ checks and proprietary databases.

Know Your Risk

We worked closely with our clients to reduce risk exposure and improve their high-risk processes. Our solutions like TruthScreen and CorpVeda have helped our clients manage end-to-end risk assessment and meet compliance with all regulations.

We continuously strive for excellence with customer satisfaction. Our unwavering attitude, efficient solution stack, and dedicated team of solution experts have helped our customers solve problems that were considered unsolvable.

We would be happy to answer all your questions and serve you the best. Please feel free to book a brainstorming session with our team of experts.

By Shivangi, 3 yearsJune 23, 2022 ago

BFSI

Types of Electronic Signatures in India: Which one is best for your business?

Digitization has brought a paradigm shift in the Indian business landscape by making critical business processes more efficient and easier. From leading businesses to SMEs, everyone is leveraging digital solutions to run operations 10x faster and keep their business safe and compliant.

Talking about digital solutions, ‘e-signature’ is becoming one of the biggest trends to accelerate this shift. E-signatures are legally valid in India for more than 20 years. The Information Technology Act (IT Act), passed in 2000, granted e-signatures the same legal status as handwritten signatures.

With the rise of digital SMBs, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of digital e-signing solutions. However, not many businesses have a clear understanding of e-signature laws in India. Let’s discuss this in detail.

What are e-signatures?

As the name suggests, e-signatures are the electronic signatures to sign the documents digitally. It is the digital equivalent of wet signatures (also known as handwritten signatures). While it is time-consuming to manage and sign documents manually, e-signatures enable instant approval and automatic storage in the cloud. So rather than spending hours on tedious paperwork, businesses can enable faster workflow and smart documentation with e-signing solutions.

Types of e-signatures recognized under the IT Act 2000

(1) E-signatures that combine an Aadhaar with an eKYC service

The government of India has issued a unique identification number to all Indian residents – known as Aadhaar ID. Any user with an Aadhaar ID can leverage an online e-signature service to sign the documents digitally in a secured manner. The online e-sign service is provided to users through a mobile application or web interface by integrating it with an Application Service Provider (ASP) like NSDL and CDAC.

Users can easily leverage mobile application or web interface, complete a simple authentication process for identity validation using an eKYC service, and apply e-signatures to any online document.

(2) Digital signatures by asymmetric crypto mechanism and hashing function

Digital signatures comprise asymmetric cryptosystem techniques (a pair of private and public keys for encryption/decryption), hashing, and e-authentication. Digital signatures are issued to users in the form of digital certificates.

As defined in the IT Act, these digital signature certificates are issued only by a trusted Certifying Authority (CA). These certificates include the user’s name, public key, the certificate expiration date, and other important information. Operating systems and browsers maintain a list of trusted CA root certificates to validate digital certificates issued by a CA. It is to maintain the integrity of electronic documents and directly link the identity to the document to ensure legitimacy.

Which factors make e-signatures valid in India?

As per the IT Act, there are 5 criteria that e-signatures must meet to be legally valid:

E-signatures must be linked to the signatory (person signing the document).
During the signing process, the signatory should have total control over the data used to produce the e-signature.
Any alteration to the affixed e-signature must be detectable.
An audit trail should be there to detail steps taken during the signing process.
The digital signature certificate must be issued by a Certifying Authority and recognized by the Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) appointed under the IT Act.

Can documents of all kinds be executed using e-signatures?

Certain documents can only be executed with wet signatures to be legally enforceable. These include:

Real estate contracts
Negotiable instruments (promissory note, bill of exchange, etc.)
Powers of attorney
Trust deeds
Wills or testamentary documents

How to find the right DTM platform (Document Transaction Management) for your business?

Onboarding workflows

When choosing a DTM platform, ensure it offers customisable and automated onboarding workflows. A cloud-based digital workflow and e-signing solution will provide complete automation and control over key aspects of your paper-based document processes. Get a solution that ensures a seamless onboarding, provides multiple signature options and can be easily coupled/decoupled based on your business requirement.

Level of identity verification and type of signatures

A DTM solution should offer 360-degree verification to onboard the right vendors and business partners. Our solution verifies all the information of your partner journey starting with registration to post onboarding monitoring. Our process is backed by 115+ industry-accepted checks including national ID verification, business ID verification, bank account verification, and many more. We provide access to the largest corporate, negative and proprietary databases to verify partners at every level. Our solutions take care of end-to-end onboarding journeys right from partner discovery to bulk invitation to activation.

Transactional compliance requirements in special cases

Different types of signatures are used in various industries and transactional compliance requirements differ in every industry. For example, in pharma and FDA-compliant industries, 21 CFR Part 11 is used to sign the clinical trial process. Compliance checks that are crucial in industries are FDA Documentation, 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, eIDAS, EMA, ISO 27001, Health Level 7 (HL7), IF Act 2000, and GdocP. The right document transaction management platform should take care of these compliance requirements for special cases, and special industries.

Storage, retrieval and integration options

Before choosing a DTM platform for e-signatures, it is crucial to evaluate if the solution is easily integrable as well as can also function as a stand-alone application. It should provide secure digital storage of all documents for record-keeping and future access – while maintaining the legal sanctity of the transaction. This will enable business to create, collaborate, store and track all important documents from anywhere, anytime.

How can AuthBridge’s SignDrive, a DTM platform, automate your document flow?

Reduce manual hassles with automated workflows

SignDrive, AuthBridge’s DTM solution, reduces manual hassles for the enterprises by enabling them to upload, sign, submit and manage documents digitally. It enables multiple users to electronically sign documents on cloud-based storage and gives businesses complete control and transparency. This easily integrable and customisable e-sign solution helps businesses with automated workflows, authentication, document management, tracking, and storage – all in a single design-led platform.

2. Save time, money, and resources

The physical document signing, storage, and other processes during onboarding/verification are cumbersome and time-consuming. SignDrive eliminates all these complexities by enabling businesses to quickly access, prepare, and sign documents digitally. The best part is that organizations can go paperless, and save time and money previously spent on the physical resources – reducing operational costs.

3. Reduce TAT significantly

As the end-to-end documentation process is automated, businesses can significantly reduce turnaround time for preparing and signing agreements. The decreasing TAT is directly proportional to increasing productivity. With SignDrive, businesses can prepare agreements, contracts, MoUs, etc., and deliver documents to all the stakeholders instantly. It also enables document collaboration with internal and external stakeholders where multiple users can sign documents electronically.

4. Legally admissible e-signs and compliant practices

Our solution keeps businesses compliant for future audits by making record-keeping easier. As the information is stored digitally, there are no chances for a manual error or document misplacement by the signee or record-keeper. SignDrive is data security compliant with industry standards that helps create legally enforceable electronic signatures and complete legal formalities seamlessly.

Get on a call with our experts to understand your documentation requirements.

By Shivangi, 3 yearsJune 22, 2022 ago

Background Checks

Use of Technology in Blue-Collar Screening

India’s blue-collar job market witnessed the strongest growth in the first half of 2022, with the falling number of Covid infections, lifting of restrictions, and a pickup in economic activity. Due to the higher demand for manpower, February 2022 clocked more than 1 million active blue-collar jobs, which includes 800,000 new jobs as per an ET survey.
The numbers speak volumes about why businesses today want to verify different aspects of a person’s past faster and safeguard against reputational risks.

Blue-collar employees are an integral part of the workforce to run critical processes like manufacturing, warehousing, construction, retail, logistics etc. that directly influence the revenues of any organization. That makes thorough blue-collar background verification even more important. Businesses today are heavily investing their resources to evaluate staff in a bias-free and quicker way. This is a significant step to reduce per-hire costs and time-to-hire new blue-collar employees but most importantly to reduce serious reputational risks.
Businesses do want to conduct blue-collar background verification however, it can be a bit challenging for the HR teams. Following up on manual processes can be cumbersome and time-consuming, delaying employee onboarding. How would it be if the entire background screening activity could be automated, ensuring only reliable blue-collar employees are hired with speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency? Different processes could be easily accessed to make informed decisions and set up internal policies to reinforce them too? So, what are the top ways to verify blue-collar employees?

Access to Proprietary Databases for Instant Blue-Collar Verification

With the digitization shift, AuthBridge created the largest proprietary identity, education, and criminal databases in the country to quicken searches and blue-collar employee verification. It leverages the power of AI and deep search algorithms to verify blue-collar hires in real-time, especially in the case of National ID checks and Digital Address Verification.

Automate HR Operations for Streamlined Hiring

With massive blue-collar hiring, it’s time for businesses to get up to speed and expedite background verification. If people’s operations are handed away to automation, it’ll be much easier and faster to conduct blue-collar verification. So, let us understand how AuthBridge’s blue-collar screening solution streamlines extensive hiring.

Top USPs of Blue-Collar Background Screening

1. Reliable, qualitative checks
2. Faster and scalable blue-collar onboarding
3. Driven by new-age technology
4. Multilingual, easy-to-use interface
5. Customisable employee journeys
6. Compliance-driven data security
7. Presence across cities, including Tier 1 and Tier

AuthBridge-powered authentication solutions are simple, tech-driven, and hassle-free. Our consultative approach to blue-collar verification works in sync with your existing processes, to protect against financial and reputational risks. Our blue-collar solution includes delivery boy screening, cab driver verification, food delivery boy verification, courier boy, verification, truck driver verification, and many more.

Types of Background Checks to be included in Blue-Collar Hiring:

1. Identity checks
2. Court records checks
3. Digital address verification
4. Bank account verification

In today’s digital era, it’s inevitable to enable remote, contactless, and real-time background checks to create an authentic ecosystem of ‘go-to’ candidates to fit the right blue-collar jobs.

End-to-End Employee Onboarding Journeys

Recruiting and managing a huge blue-collar workforce is prone to human errors. With most blue-collar workers belonging to different locations, it’s difficult to track their location and credentials. This can lead to inaccurate and faulty hiring decisions. But now, it’s possible to digitally verify and onboard blue-collar employees at scale using data-driven techniques. Our background checks help eliminate blue-collar fraud by furnishing accurate reports about every hire. We use an advanced tech-based, consultative approach to create a seamless, and scalable model to verify and onboard blue-collar quickly.

Get started with AuthBridge’s tech-driven 360-degree blue-collar screening solution today. You can also contact us for a demo at sales@authbridge.com

[Source: ET]

By Shivangi, 3 yearsJune 21, 2022 ago

Background Checks

Hiring Blue-Collar Staff Can Be Risky, Verify Them!

India’s blue-collar job market witnessed the strongest growth in the first half of 2022, with the falling number of Covid infections, lifting of restrictions and a pickup in economic activity. Due to the higher demand for manpower, February 2022 clocked more than 1 million active blue-collar jobs, which includes 800,000 new jobs as per an ET survey.
The numbers speak volumes about why businesses today want to thoroughly verify different aspects of a person’s past faster and safeguard against reputational risks.

By Shivangi, 3 yearsJune 21, 2022 ago

Blogs

The Changing Face of Indian Innovation: A Closer Look with Sandeep Singh

Today, more than ever, technology has the power to transform background screening in India. Companies like AuthBridge are leveraging technology to offer better screening solutions to their customers and provide seamless onboarding experiences. In a panel interview at the BW Business World TechTors 2022, Sandeep Singh, SVP, Product, AuthBridge sheds light on the importance of India specific tech solutions and how swiftly we are moving in that direction. Let’s read a few interesting excerpts from this interview shared below:

Q1. How do you leverage technology to offer better solutions to customers and how tech has evolved?

Technology is an enabler, and to leverage technology it is important to have a deep customer connection. Understanding the customer pain points is a must and then using technology to offer the right solution. That’s what we do at AuthBridge! We help build platforms for background verification wherever there’s a trust issue between two parties at the time of hiring a vendor or a candidate. We leverage ML, OCR, and various other technologies to help. We use big data platforms to find out if we can work/partner with a particular company or not. The core idea is to find data around education, employment, criminal history, etc. Earlier this was done using manual processes and now it’s all digital.

Q2. How is technology playing a key role to enable/augment business growth for start-ups/ big scale industries?

Technology is certainly helping start-ups scale. Today, the entire internet has changed with the help of democratisation of technology where anyone can start something of their own. For AuthBridge, we had been solving problems using manual operations, but there were errors. But now using tech, we’ve cleaned this up and do it far more efficiently. Our TAT of 30 days has significantly reduced to 2 days. Technology has solved our customer problem faster and better. There’s an established method to solve a problem using great ideas, theory, which is 3x, 5x better but using technology, the solution becomes 10x better.

Q3. There’s an old adage which says disruption starts with introspection. How true is this statement in your career trajectory or from your company lens?

Having deep introspection is the key. But my observation says that having an agile mindset, a deep customer connection (customer problem) and being ready to change are the real disruptors.

One must be ready to disrupt themselves or be flexible with the changing conditions, leading to good IBITA and revenues. It’s important to have the courage to adopt and change business practices. That is the real introspection.

Q4. We talk of disruptions, innovations, technologies in the Indian content, what are your observations when talking of these things when juxtaposed with the global landscape.

Indian innovation has just begun, in the last decade. Our true innovation majorly lies in the Indian context. What starts globally is an enabler, but the question to ask is does it solve India specific problems? No. Indian problems are large and complex to solve, connecting companies and ecosystems is the key. Once you crack that model you just scale through. We need more India specific innovations and only using the best technology can help. Many new age founders will turn into profitable unicorns by serving the Indian market. Infact, I’m sure 10 years from now, our models will be used outside to scale at ease and speed.

Q 5. What are some of the trends that you anticipate in the next 2 years and how do you see business as technology as a business necessity? how do you think everything will pan out?

AuthBridge is a company that helps solve trust issues when two parties are doing a transaction. Where someone is hiring one party, or hiring a vendor, or signing on to a platform to play a game, there is a trust issue. As digitisation increases and if ever we go into the metaverse era, the possibilities of fraud will increase. That is where we see a lot of opportunities coming up for companies like AuthBridge to grow, connect and solve trust issues. A lot of India specific use cases are now out there to draw inspiration.

Closing Comments

Technology will remain the enabler always. Finding those India specific pain points, understanding them well and then figuring out how we can solve them is the bottom line, rather than copying models. We can create a billion-dollar business in a country like India if we devise ways to scale growth. What you need is a very specific solution to problems, which is what every tech entrepreneur looks forward to.

By Shivangi, 3 yearsJune 17, 2022 ago

Blogs

Driver Screening: Is your next driver safe?

In the unlock phase of COVID pandemic, businesses are fast recovering to near-normal levels, resulting in a surge in blue-collar hiring. When an organisation hires blue-collar staff like drivers, delivery boys etc, reputational risks of hiring a fraud or an unethical candidate with a possible criminal background or even fake identity are the greatest risks. With the rising cases of hit and run, sexual assaults, delivery frauds, etc, committed by drivers in the country, it is inevitable that their identity and credentials are verified using driver screening solutions to keep organizations safe.

“A 26-year-old Ola cab driver arrested by the Mumbai police for molesting a 15-year-old female passenger. The case in example is the recent story in The Hindustan Times. This is good food for thought for hiring teams to remember at the time of driver verification. This is why HR teams should think about including AuthBridge-powered driver background verification and onboarding solutions into their suite of safe hiring processes.

So, how does our technology- driven driver license verification solution work?

Let’s Introduce our Blue-Collar Screening Solution for Drivers First

Our technology driven, qualitative background screening solution for your blue-collar staff can mitigate your business risks and protect your reputation. We follow a consultative approach to improve your existing verification processes, to protect your business against serious reputational damages in the future. Checks like instant identity verification, digital address verification, criminal record verification, etc. are a part of our automated, end-to-end blue collar background verification screening solution. It’s true that mere absence of criminal history is not an indicator of future honesty but still it gives some sense into an employee’s character and past behavioural pattern.

Employee Screening

Risk & Compliance

Financial Intelligence

Identity Verification

Utilities

Enity/Business Level

Employment

Banking & Payments

Fraud Detection

Professional

Background Verification

Due-Diligence

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iBRIDGE 2.0 – The Next-Gen Background Verification Platform

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Featured Resource

What is Third-Party Due Diligence?

Types of third-party risks in supply chain networks and how to mitigate them?

Informational Risks

Operational Risks

Financial Risks

Reputational Risk

Regulatory Risks

How are AuthBridge’s third-party due diligence solutions helping various industries?

What are e-signatures?

Types of e-signatures recognized under the IT Act 2000

Which factors make e-signatures valid in India?

Can documents of all kinds be executed using e-signatures?

How to find the right DTM platform (Document Transaction Management) for your business?

How can AuthBridge’s SignDrive, a DTM platform, automate your document flow?

Access to Proprietary Databases for Instant Blue-Collar Verification

Let’s Introduce our Blue-Collar Screening Solution for Drivers First

Top Benefits of Our Driver Screening Solution:

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