As per IRDAI regulations, PIVC (Pre-Issuance Verification Call) is recommended to prevent mis-selling and unfair business practices and to ensure that during policy solicitation and sale stages, the prospects are fully informed and made aware of the terms and conditions of the product being sold. And IRDAI recommends going the digital way.
We have a pioneering solution for PIVC that was released in early 2020 to help navigate non face to face digital PIVC in the Covid era. The PIVC solution we built is a video based pre issuance verification which accomplishes quite a lot in a single self-serve video session. Some technologies we used to build are: Text to speech and speech to text, video optimisation based on device and camera codec, face capture from video streams (best photo), passive face liveness, face matching between frames and face not found, there is also a pause and restart function in our Mobile SDK (but doesn’t work on browsers) and a lot more features to enable Video PIVC.
Sharing some PIVC best practices that we have adopted so if your considering implementing a PIVC solution within your insurance business you can benefit from our learnings. Do check out our PIVC solution out before embarking on this journey.
What could go wrong: Firstly, the session is browser-based, so the entire video is captured and uploaded from a mobile browser. There is a significant chance of high drop-offs during browser-based video capture if the packets are not handled correctly. Due to connectivity issues or poor handling, the upload process may experience substantial drop-offs.
PIVC Best Practices: We use chunked video uploads to ease the load on uploads, and in particular, when the bandwidth is low. This involves breaking the video into smaller chunks that are uploaded sequentially and asynchronously. With this we have a high chance of succeeding and retrying from where it last failed. In addition we provide a real time progress indicator which lets the user know that the PIVC video upload is successful with real time messages if there are network congestion.
What could go wrong: What works in Chrome may not work in Safari or proprietary mobile browsers (e.g Vivo, Xiomi, Samsung or Oppo built-in browsers). If you are capturing video with live recording using the device’s mic and camera, there are numerous security issues you must address to avoid concerns from your internal risk management team.
PIVC Best Practices: We use a proprietary compression to ensure that the videos are compressed in memory and use a variety of other techniques to track available memory and limit the video durations to ensure that the video is uploaded successfully once the PIVC is completed.
What could go wrong: The capture is not always performed correctly by customers. End users often hold the device improperly (e.g., at stomach level, which results in a fisheye view of the face looking downward, instead of holding the device level with their face to produce a mirror-like view). This can cause matching and other face liveness parameters to fail.
PIVC Best Practices: We offer a variety of instructions for device positioning and real-time guidance during the capture process using prompts and toasts to enable the user to hold the device in the right way for video capture. There is also a feedback loop for recapture if the checks and balances fail during the capture process.
What could go wrong: There are instances when the whole recording will work but the final output will be 0 bytes. Absolutely a morale killer for developers when they see this and a bad user experience for your customers. Only the most skilled can solve for these contextual and device specific problems.
PIVC Best Practices: We detect and identify default native device-specific browsers (Safari on iOS, or proprietary browsers on Android devices like Vivo or Oppo) during the PIVC process. When detected, we provide a clear warning to users informing them that these browsers may cause issues and recommend switching to a compatible browser. This can be achieved through a prompt or notification early in the process to ensure users are aware and can avoid potential disruptions to the PIVC experience.
What could go wrong: Capturing a face for a 10 second liveness session is easier than getting the User to go through a 2 – 3 minute video session on their own with instructions to proceed. Unless UI/UX is perfectly designed the drop-offs will be high.
PIVC Best Practices: To reduce drop-offs we provide clear and easy to understand instructions throughout the session, including progress indicators and interactive feedback to guide users step-by-step.
What could go wrong: As the video session is content-rich, it should also be available in the language of choice for consumers (besides, it’s a regulation). If you do not know how to integrate language packs that are not natively available, then you have a broken system.
PIVC Best Practices: This is a difficult one as there can be language packs for displaying the text but there may not be a text to speech language pack that will enable speaking the text in a language of choice by the User. We have embedded 09 language packs in our PIVC that is readily available for translating the text on the fly during the PIVC. This is a tough one to get it right if you want a feature rich PIVC such as text to speech and speech to text included in the flow.
What starts as a one-man project can soon eclipse into a multi-crore development work which will take several years to see returns. So, think carefully if it’s essential to build it wherein we have already cracked all of the problems listed above so you can get started and focus on compliance rather than reinventing the wheel again.
We have built an awesome journey builder, template designer and ready to go PIVC function (no-code and APIs). You can launch your entire PIVC flow from start to finish in under an hour. Don’t take our word. Try a demo and trial for yourself.
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FRSLABS is an award-winning research and development company specialising in customer onboarding, identity verification and fraud prevention solutions for businesses. Whether you are a big bank, insurance, telco or a small investment broker, we help you onboard and verify your customers with greater flexibility, compliance and reliability.
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