Founded in 2016, Smartr365 is an end-to-end mortgage and protection platform that connects advisors, estate agents and home buyers. Headquartered in London, Smartr365’s technology platform unites financial advisers and state-of-the-art technology to empower better financial decisions and planning for clients.

At an early stage of its evolution, Smartr365 recognised the need for a digital ID partner that could streamline its workflows and complete the required checks reliably, securely and quickly. Following extensive research, Smartr365 chose to partner with Digidentity, Europe’s leading online identity verification company, capable of providing the best user experience and compliant Know Your Customer (KYC) user onboarding process.

Finding a Viable Solution

The digital verification component that Digidentity provides offers a significant asset to Smartr365’s client base by offering fast, affordable and compliant AML checks. This proved particularly popular with lenders and brokers.

Smartr365 and Digidentity’s collaboration significantly streamlines the online verification process, reducing a task that can take hours, days or even weeks to mere minutes. Removing the compliance burden for organisations means that brokers have more time to focus on finding the best deals for their customers.

Attitude Adjustment

Though the technology was already proven, there remained a need to shift behaviour patterns and business cultures among brokers and lenders – who initially doubted the security and reliability of digital ID services. This presented a barrier to long term progress, so in collaboration with Smartr365, Digidentity worked to educate the market to ensure that those consuming the trust were comfortable with the process.

Though Digidentity had exerted a lot of time and effort into educating customers on the reliability of its services, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a helpful catalyst to the sector – forcing organisations to embrace technology at a time where face-to-face interactions were not possible. Success here has enabled Smartr365 to take its partnership with Digidentity to the next level.

Re-Launching with App and Full Integration

With Digidentity’s solution playing an important role in enabling Smartr365 to streamline its signing and verification services remotely, the organisation recently decided to re-launch its app using Digidentity’s Software Development Kit (SDK).

The SDK gives the service provider (Smartr365 in this case) the ability to incorporate Digidentity’s offering directly into its own mobile app. The SDK is fully customisable, which means Smartr365 gets to not only select the types of checks it wants, but is also able to change the branding.

The implementation of the SDK has completely redefined the onboarding process, allowing users to go through ID checks before picking brokers. Ultimately this streamlined approach is expected to further increase digital ID adoption rates.

A working partnership

Digidentity has worked with Smartr365 to build a service that meets the needs of its user-base and has helped to overcome the initial disjointed workflow processes that Smartr365 was first facing. As a result of Digidentity’s work with the organisation, the end-to-end mortgage and protection platform has experienced significantly faster on-boarding speeds – compliant with KYC and AML regulation – as well as optimised customer experience, and greater cost effectiveness.

Conor Murphy, CEO at Smartr365 said “One of the major long term goals from the collaboration between Smartr365 and Digidentity was and still is to create an efficient, cost effective service that supports the on-boarding of users for their customers’ services. To date, the partnership has proven a great success and as the technology continues to evolve this relationship will no doubt develop further. Over the last few months, we have ramped up our activity with Digidentity, and this is a strong indicator of our confidence in the organisation. Digidentity’s software is now fully integrated and can be used seamlessly with our service offering.”