Founded in 2020 in Bangkok, Thailand, MONIX is the fintech brainchild of SCB (Siam Commercial Bank) X PLC and China's fintech unicorn Abakus Group. Combining the innovative, tech and user experience prowesses of the two financial giants, the company wasn't just set up to create new growth for SCB X PLC, but also to bring about what other legacy institutions in Thailand haven't been able to accomplish: financial inclusion.
"At MONIX, we believe in doing 'Right Things Right', and our hero FINNIX app was created with that in mind. Like several Southeast Asian markets, Thailand has a large unbanked population – without an opportunity to access legal funds. Yet, it is also the same people that are digitally-savvy and offer a lot of potential for take-up of our innovative financial products – so we wanted to do the right thing by making banking easier for them with the user-friendly FINNIX application. As expectations evolve, we keep improving the user experience too," Arche Zhou, Product Director, MONIX said.
MONIX's mission to make its innovative financial platform accessible to all Thais was one of the reasons it chose ADVANCE.AI in May 2021 as its eKYC verification partner.
Being able to reduce barriers to its products with fast verification during onboarding was a key consideration for MONIX when selecting an eKYC provider. Ensuring that MONIX can offer a secure and compliant onboarding process following Thailand's eKYC regulatory requirements was just as essential.
"It's all part of offering a fast and reliable service and experience. We want our customers to know that they are in safe hands, especially since many of them have been excluded from the financial system. It's important that they trust our product and company. To make FINNIX app accessible to everyone, we work with ADVANCE.AI for eKYC. Not only does it help us abide by regulatory biometric requirements – it works for everybody, whether you have a bank account or not," Arche added.
And in less than a month of integration with ADVANCE.AI, MONIX was already onboarding new customers for its FINNIX products: FINNIX Ignite, offering personal loans; and FINNIX Bewinged, which offers nano loans.
Understanding MONIX's business goals and its vision to ensure "all customers can get the money in 5 minutes, anytime, anywhere" was crucial for the ADVANCE.AI team to find a suitable eKYC solution. Treading the fine balance between friction and security, the eKYC process for MONIX included ADVANCE.AI's Liveness Detection, Face Comparison and ID Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which accurately scans the Thai ID card.
"5 minutes actually comprises the eKYC and credit application process. In fact, customers can complete the entire eKYC verification with just 3 steps within 1 minute. Customers have shared with us that ADVANCE.AI's OCR technology is so much more superior than other mobile apps", Chalinee Boonsongsup (Poppy), Product Owner, MONIX said.
Poppy also pointed out, "ADVANCE.AI helps us better serve our target group of unbanked customers. These customers typically have mobile devices with less-than-ideal camera capabilities, but with ADVANCE.AI's eKYC solution, we can still properly onboard them. Now, we can confidently say that thanks to ADVANCE.AI's reliability and high accuracy of over 99%, we are able to cover all mobile devices and serve more customers."
After implementing ADVANCE.AI's eKYC solution, the MONIX team continually monitors the solution performance to ensure that it remains a good fit for MONIX's customers and the organisation's needs.
"We are happy that ADVANCE.AI has exceeded our expectations – whether it's the Face Comparison's thresholds of FAR (false acceptance rate) / FRR (false rejection rate) or providing support to our team," Poppy mentioned.
"The ADVANCE.AI team has been very supportive since the beginning of our partnership: from project kick-off to implementation, sandbox testing and maintenance. Responses are always quick, and we are always able to reach whoever we need to for a solution or answer. When we receive feedback from our own customers, we share it with ADVANCE.AI too. Our experience with ADVANCE.AI is that you always take feedback seriously, and you come back with product enhancements and definite solutions!"
As the #1 digital lending app on Google Play Store and Apple App Store in Thailand, with over 7.5 million app installs, FINNIX's popularity is apparent. MONIX is truly every Thai's financial best friend as the brand has set out to achieve. So we asked both Arche and Poppy: what next?
"From a growth standpoint, product-wise, we want to be able to provide new lending products and other financial products. And as AI tech keeps improving, we want to work with ADVANCE.AI to further optimise and enhance our current eKYC process," Arche said.
Poppy added, "Trust is very important in the fintech industry. For us, as a business, it's important to know who we are dispensing money to and how we are going to get it back. In this way, authentication is important, so we need to make sure we have the right tools to really know our customers. Otherwise, we might not be able to get our repayments. On the other hand, we need our customers to trust us with the information that they shared with us. ADVANCE.AI makes sure that trust is built: between MONIX and our customers – and between ADVANCE.AI and MONIX – and that's what we want to keep building too."