Client

A fast-growing Lending Service Provider (LSP) in India focused on small-ticket personal loans and BNPL products.

Context

For this lender, speed wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the product.

Their growth came from approving and disbursing loans quickly, often within the same session. But as volumes picked up, their onboarding system started showing cracks. Manual checks slowed things down, fraud attempts increased, and genuine borrowers were getting stuck in the middle.

What worked at a low scale was now holding the business back.

The Problem: Speed vs. Control

The lender was facing three issues at the same time, and fixing one usually made the others worse.

Long forms were killing intent.
Borrowers were asked to manually fill 40+ fields during application. Most never finished. Nearly 70% dropped off before completing the journey.

Synthetic identity fraud was slipping through.
Fraudsters were submitting edited PAN and Aadhaar images, screenshots of documents, or layered photos that legacy OCR tools failed to catch. Manual review became the fallback, but that only slowed things further.

Selfie verification was unreliable.
The existing face match setup rejected a large number of genuine users due to lighting issues or camera quality. False rejections touched 40%, while smarter spoofs still got through.

Disbursals were slow.
Every questionable case went to manual review. What should have been instant stretched to 24–48 hours, hurting both user trust and conversion.

The team was stuck trying to balance speed, fraud control, and operational sanity.

The Shift: Moving to a Unified Onboarding & Risk Flow

Instead of adding more manual checks, the lender reworked the entire onboarding flow using SecureID by Cashfree Payments.

The goal was simple:
Make the journey faster for real borrowers and harder for fake ones, without increasing ops load.

What Changed

1. 1-Click Onboarding (Removing Early Friction)

The first fix was eliminating form fatigue.

Using 1-Click Onboarding, most borrower details were auto-filled using mobile-based intelligence (with user consent). Name, DOB, address, and other basic details came in before documents were even uploaded.

This meant borrowers were already invested in the process before hitting verification steps.

Impact:
Drop-offs reduced sharply, and identity data was available instantly.

2. Smart OCR for PAN & Aadhaar (Quality Before Verification)

Next came document intelligence.

Instead of accepting any upload and fixing issues later, Smart OCR evaluated document quality in real time.

It checked for:

• Blur, glare, partial images, black-and-white photocopies

• Screenshots, edited images, photo overlays, and altered documents

• Age eligibility and QR validity (for Aadhaar)

Around 15% of applications were flagged early for poor-quality or tampered documents, before they entered deeper verification.

This alone removed a large chunk of manual review.

3. Face Match & Liveness (Built for Indian Conditions)

The lender also replaced its selfie verification setup.

SecureID’s Face Match and Liveness system was tuned for:

• Poor lighting

• Low-end cameras

• Real-world usage patterns

False rejections dropped from 40% to 2%, while spoof attempts involving age mismatches or replays were caught more reliably.

Real-time prompts guided users to fix common mistakes instead of failing them silently.

Result:
More genuine users passed. More synthetic identities were blocked.

4. Reverse Penny Drop (Clean Disbursals)

Finally, disbursals were secured using Reverse Penny Drop.

Before funds moved, the system verified that the bank account holder name matched the KYC identity. Multi-bank routing ensured high success rates even during partner bank downtimes.

This closed the loop from onboarding to payout.

The Outcome

Within months of rollout, the changes were visible:

• Time to disbursal reduced from 2 days to 10 minutes

• Approval rates increased by 25% due to cleaner data upfront

• ₹5 Cr+ in potential fraud prevented within 6 months

• Cost per loan application reduced by 60%

• 90% of approvals became zero-touch, with no manual review

• 99.8% success rate, even on low-bandwidth (2G) networks

What Changed Internally

Teams stopped firefighting.

Ops no longer had to inspect every edge case.
Product teams didn’t need to slow down growth to stay safe.
Fraud controls improved without hurting genuine users.

Most importantly, onboarding stopped being the bottleneck.

Conclusion

By adopting SecureID’s unified onboarding and risk platform, the lender solved a familiar fintech problem: how to move fast without letting fraud through.

The journey became easier for real borrowers and significantly harder for fake ones. Disbursals became near-instant. Ops costs dropped. Fraud became manageable.

Speed and security stopped competing with each other.

About SecureID

SecureID by Cashfree Payments helps lenders onboard users faster while maintaining strong fraud controls. It combines 1-Click Onboarding, Smart OCR for PAN/Aadhaar, Face Match & Liveness, and bank verification to enable instant, compliant onboarding at scale.