#customer verification

Explore how Video KYC for banks is transforming digital customer onboarding with faster verifications, reduced fraud, and seamless compliance. This image highlights the power of remote KYC through a secure, real-time process where banks verify identities via live video calls. Perfect for financial institutions, fintechs, and digital onboarding solution providers looking to adopt secure, RBI-compliant KYC methods. Learn how platforms like Gridlines simplify the journey with advanced Video KYC APIs that are fast, accurate, and fully integrated.

In today’s competitive banking landscape, speed, convenience, and compliance are key to onboarding new customers. Traditional KYC (Know Your Customer) processes—while secure—often involve physical documentation, branch visits, and long processing times. This results in drop-offs, operational delays, and rising costs. Video KYC for banks is changing the game by offering a compliant, real-time, and paperless way to verify customers.

With increasing adoption across both public and private sector banks, Video KYC is emerging as a cornerstone of modern digital banking.

What Is Video KYC?

Video KYC (Know Your Customer) is a video-based customer identification process (V-CIP) where a customer is verified via a live video call with a KYC officer. The process includes:

Verifying government-issued documents (like Aadhaar, PAN, passport)

Matching the customer’s face to their ID proof

Confirming location via geo-tagging

Conducting liveliness checks to ensure real-time presence

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) approved the use of Video KYC in 2020, making it a legally valid and widely accepted method for onboarding customers across banks, NBFCs, and fintech platforms.

Why Banks Are Switching to Video KYC

1. Faster Onboarding Video KYC enables banks to verify customers in less than 5 minutes. This drastically reduces onboarding time compared to the traditional process, which can take several days.

2. Enhanced Fraud Prevention AI-driven features like face match, liveliness detection, and document OCR make it harder for fraudsters to manipulate the system. Video interactions also deter impersonation and identity theft.

3. Cost Savings Without the need for field agents or branch infrastructure, banks can cut down onboarding costs by up to 80%. The entire process is digital and automated, which reduces human error and overheads.

4. Remote Access for Customers Whether in a metro city or a rural town, customers can complete their KYC anytime, anywhere. All they need is a smartphone and internet connection—eliminating the need to visit a physical branch.

5. 100% Compliance with RBI Guidelines Video KYC for banks, when implemented correctly, ensures compliance with RBI regulations, including timestamped video recordings, geo-location tagging, consent capture, and secure data storage.

How Gridlines Enables Effortless Video KYC for Banks

At Gridlines, we’ve built a robust, enterprise-ready Video KYC API that helps banks verify customers instantly and securely. Our plug-and-play solution integrates seamlessly into your onboarding flow—be it on a mobile app or a web platform.

Key features include:

AI-based Face Match & Liveliness Detection: Prevents spoofing and deepfake attempts

Secure Document Capture & OCR: Extracts and verifies details from Aadhaar, PAN, etc.

Geo-tagging & Time Stamping: For regulatory compliance

Multilingual Support: To serve diverse customer bases

Audit-Ready Recordings: With encrypted storage and retrieval

Our platform is designed to handle thousands of verifications per day—ensuring scalability, reliability, and compliance.

Real-World Impact

Banks using Gridlines' Video KYC API have reported:

30–40% reduction in onboarding drop-offs

Up to 3x faster KYC completion times

Significant fraud detection improvements

From savings accounts to business loans, the applications of Video KYC are vast. It’s especially powerful for banks expanding their reach to underbanked regions or scaling digital-only products.

Final Thoughts

The Mask Aadhaar option in your downloaded e-Aadhaar pattern allows you to conceal your Aadhaar variety. The first eight digits of the Aadhaar number are replaced to produce masked Aadhaar numbers, leaving only the last four digits visible. The Aadhaar Masking solution can be used in situations where Aadhaar is required only as an identity proof. You can use a masked Aadhaar to verify both your photo and the final four digits of your individual ID. Your photo, QR code, demographic data, and other particulars will all still be there in this disguised version of your Aadhaar.

Government regulations on Aadhaar Card Masking

Businesses are required to respect Aadhaar holders' privacy. Every company that creates Aadhaar cards for customers may be required to follow the rule of masking the first eight digits of the Aadhaar number before storing it in their systems. UIDAI is in charge of Aadhaar, and various regulators including the RBI, IRDAI, TRAI, and SEBI must abide by its rules. After KYC is complete, the regulations essentially require every company that collects Aadhaar cards to hide the first eight digits of the Aadhaar number.

Formats for Aadhaar Masking Images

We assist numerous image formats that are frequently used by companies. We support the Base 64, JPG, PNG, TIFF, and PDF formats. Additionally, for successful aadhaar masking, we support single- and multiple-sided aadhaar images, straight and rotated images, colour and greyscale aadhaar images, and front and back of aadhaar on the same page.

How Does It Affect the Fintech Industry?

The most frequent document submitted during the KYC process is still an Aadhaar card. Financial institutions are currently required to conceal Aadhaar numbers on all client images they store. The UIDAI stated that as long as the Aadhaar card has been provided voluntarily and the first eight digits of the Aadhaar number are hidden while storing a physical copy of the Aadhaar card, banks may accept a masked Aadhaar card for customer verification when opening bank accounts.

Why the Fintech Sector Must Require Aadhaar Masking

As the industry giants try to serve an exponentially growing consumer base, the race for custom experience appears to be over-shadowing customer-experience. What I find interesting is, how smaller and medium size businesses mimic customer-acquisition as done by their most successful counterparts. What may not be obvious to many is that, the strategies that helped Nokia, Vodafone, Apple, or Amazon to acquire millions of customers decades ago, may not be effective today.  

Large businesses have the resources available to accelerate customer-acquisition, yet the credit is often attributed to the quality of customer-experience. While customer-experience maintains the success of a company, acquiring new customers is, and will remain most critical to the survival of a business. And as a business owner, conversion is the first sign that you are doing something right.

We need an open discussion about how SME's also, can automate customer-acquisition and increase conversion rates, while reducing the cost of the process. What should be automated and taken off the backs of your calling teams, are lead generation and lead scoring. This is because cold calling and customer service are still the most demanding aspects of growth and retention. If your advertising is decent and word of mouth has been favourable on your product, people will seek you out.

When Amazon asks you for an OTP, it is understood that they most definitely have the resources to call you and verify if you are actually you, and how they can serve you best. Yet you are asked to verify yourself via a phone number using a One-Time-Password. Wrong numbers create a lot of noise in customer-acquisition and industry leaders have eliminated this issue by automating lead scoring; a well kept a secret of explosive consumer growth among larger brands.

I have personally witnessed my own team’s struggle with lead quality and have spent significant funds to make the process easy for them. What finally worked was developing Qverifier and automating lead verification altogether.

Advertising budgets are serious money, none of which should be spent on wrong numbers or missed digits. Qverifier eliminates the need for an SMS service provider or the need for a dedicated engineer to look after the customer sign-ups and their phone number verification; which is a double win for any business owner. Qverifier Essential is free to use and also gives paid subscription options that help you auto-verify 500 new leads every month. It is exciting to let software do what it does best and have customer service teams actually service the customers. 

Automated lead generation and lead scoring is the most revolutionary aspect of customer verification upon first contact. Lead nurturing and retention, as I see it should be achieved by utilising the calling teams you already have. I invite you to let Qverifier look after your lead verification and let your people look after your customers.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is customer acquisition in CRM? - A customer acquisition system is a clear cut intend to assist possibilities with observing your image, assisting them through their purchasing with handling until they become clients. ... The thought is to instruct and connect with your optimal possible clients so they become drives that proselyte to possibilities who purchase your item or administration.

What is new customer acquisition? - customer acquisition is the most common way of acquiring new clients. ... Brands use client securing to comprehend the worth of each paying client by estimating the cash an organization spends to get another client. The lower the promoting spend expected to gain another client, the higher the benefit.

Regards

As the industry giants try to serve an exponentially growing consumer base, the race for custom experience appears to be over-shadowing customer-experience. What I find interesting is, how smaller and medium size businesses mimic customer-acquisition as done by their most successful counterparts. What may not be obvious to many is that, the strategies that helped Nokia, Vodafone, Apple, or Amazon to acquire millions of customers decades ago, may not be effective today.  

Large businesses have the resources available to accelerate customer-acquisition, yet the credit is often attributed to the quality of customer-experience. While customer-experience maintains the success of a company, acquiring new customers is, and will remain most critical to the survival of a business. And as a business owner, conversion is the first sign that you are doing something right.

We need an open discussion about how SME's also, can automate customer-acquisition and increase conversion rates, while reducing the cost of the process. What should be automated and taken off the backs of your calling teams, are lead generation and lead scoring. This is because cold calling and customer service are still the most demanding aspects of growth and retention. If your advertising is decent and word of mouth has been favourable on your product, people will seek you out.

When Amazon asks you for an OTP, it is understood that they most definitely have the resources to call you and verify if you are actually you, and how they can serve you best. Yet you are asked to verify yourself via a phone number using a One-Time-Password. Wrong numbers create a lot of noise in customer-acquisition and industry leaders have eliminated this issue by automating lead scoring; a well kept a secret of explosive consumer growth among larger brands.

I have personally witnessed my own team’s struggle with lead quality and have spent significant funds to make the process easy for them. What finally worked was developing Qverifier and automating lead verification altogether.

Advertising budgets are serious money, none of which should be spent on wrong numbers or missed digits. Qverifier eliminates the need for an SMS service provider or the need for a dedicated engineer to look after the customer sign-ups and their phone number verification; which is a double win for any business owner. Qverifier Essential is free to use and also gives paid subscription options that help you auto-verify 500 new leads every month. It is exciting to let software do what it does best and have customer service teams actually service the customers.