The journey from digital identity to CDI

In recent years, digital identity has revolutionized individual banking by providing seamless access to financial services with enhanced security.
However, the corporate banking sector has faced more complex challenges. The advent of Corporate Digital Identity (CDI) represents a major opportunity to address these unique needs, offering a scalable, standardized solution for corporate clients.
From digital identity to CDI
While digital identity simplifies secure verification for individuals, corporate banking presents unique complexities. Corporate entities often operate across multiple jurisdictions and feature intricate organizational structures, making their verification more challenging. Especially as they do not have passports, fingerprints or selfies to help identify themselves.
CDI extends the principles of digital identity to address these complexities, automating data collection and verification while ensuring compliance across borders. By providing a standardized, scalable framework, CDI tackles key challenges such as:
- Dynamic data needs: Collecting, updating and validating corporate data from numerous sources in real-time as business operations evolve.
- Complex data hierarchies: Managing relationships between parent companies, subsidiaries, and affiliates.
- Multi-jurisdictional compliance: Ensuring that corporate entities meet regulatory requirements across borders.
CDI addresses these challenges by leveraging technology to automate data collection and verification processes to analyze corporate data. Additionally identifying inconsistencies and flagging potential risks in real time.
As a result, reducing the reliance on manual reviews and making operational time savings of up to 32% across the end-to-end process. Moreover, CDI platforms enable banks to centralize their compliance efforts, creating a single source of truth that ensures consistency across geographies.
How CDI works
At its core, CDI creates a centralized and reusable digital profile for corporate entities. This profile consolidates verified public data and private data sourced from outreach. Subsequently enabling banks to access up-to-date, standardized information when needed. Automation is key to CDI’s functionality, streamlining tasks which are traditionally manual and time-consuming. Key components of CDI include:
- Data aggregation and verification: CDI pulls data from public records, premium sources and corporate submissions. It uses automation to validate and authenticate this information.
- Standardization: By unifying disparate data sources into a single framework, CDI ensures consistency and eliminates redundancies. Standardization is vital for enabling interoperability between systems and jurisdictions.
- Automation: CDI automates many aspects of corporate onboarding and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, reducing manual intervention and minimizing errors.
- Privacy and security: Utilizing privacy-by-design principles, CDI ensures that only necessary data is shared and accessed securely, protecting corporate clients’ sensitive information.
Efficiency gains and cost savings
Banks that adopt CDI stand to gain substantial benefits, particularly in terms of efficiency. CDI streamlines the corporate onboarding process, drastically reducing the time and resources traditionally required. While manual onboarding tasks typically take an average of 51 hours per client at a Tier 1 bank, automation can reduce operational time savings by up to 32% across the end-to-end process. As a result, significantly minimizing the need for manual reviews and lowering operational costs. These savings, coupled with fewer errors, allow banks to reallocate resources to more strategic initiatives.
Improved client experience
Moreover, CDI enhances the client experience by addressing a growing demand for seamless interactions. Corporate clients, familiar with the convenience of digital services in their personal lives, expect the same level of ease in their business dealings. Research shows that 93% of Corporate Treasurers have been repeatedly asked for the same information. CDI eliminates these redundant document requests, creating a smoother, more efficient onboarding process that fosters greater trust with clients.
Regulatory compliance and risk mitigation
Credit and financial institutions faced nearly $5 billion in fines in 2022 due to anti-money laundering (AML) violations, sanctions breaches, and deficiencies in their KYC systems. As regulatory pressures continue to mount, the need for accurate and auditable processes has never been greater. CDI addresses these challenges by creating a ‘single source of truth’ for corporate client data, enhancing transparency and accountability. Its scalability also enables banks to integrate emerging technologies into their compliance strategies, future-proofing their operations.
Building strong data foundations
CDI’s success relies on high-quality, structured data supported by validation and standardization. Data validation ensures accuracy and legitimacy by cross-referencing trusted sources, reducing risks and enhancing confidence in client profiles. Standardization aligns disparate data into a unified framework, improving consistency, compliance, and operational efficiency.
While integrating validated, standardized data can be complex, incremental improvements in data quality and governance, as highlighted in our Chartis Research reports, provide a practical path forward. These steps enable banks to unlock CDI’s transformative potential, streamlining compliance, enhancing client onboarding, and driving operational excellence.
The evolution of digital identity to CDI
In conclusion, the journey from digital identity to CDI marks a pivotal shift in how banks approach corporate onboarding and compliance.
As the financial industry continues its digital transformation, CDI offers a path forward for banks to not only improve their processes but also build stronger relationships with corporate clients through a seamless and transparent experience.
The transition from digital identity to CDI is an ongoing evolution. With a strong data foundation and the integration of advanced technologies, CDI will enable banks to unlock new levels of efficiency, security, and growth. Embracing CDI today sets the stage for a future where corporate onboarding is faster, smarter, and more secure, driving long-term success in a rapidly changing landscape.
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