Hundreds of companies collaborate every day, and there will still be more to come as it’s an unending cycle in the world of business. This is because collaboration is how companies do business, thrive, and maximize their capabilities.
Before a partnership/collaboration agreement is reached between businesses, various preliminary processes must be carried out, such as due diligence, negotiations, and legal reviews, which can span any length of time. These processes take longer and might be prone to errors if they are manually done and not scrutinized.
For this reason, workflow and process automation have become the order of the day. In this blog post, we will take a deep dive to understand how automated workflows can improve the accuracy of business verification checks.
What is a Business Verification Process?
Business verification is a process in which a business’s legality is verified. This process involves checking the existence of a company/business. It includes the registration details, regulatory compliance, financial records, and other necessary details for establishing a business relationship. No one would like to incorporate an illegal business into any relationship or have a relationship with a business going bankrupt because of bad financial decisions and management.
Need for Automation in Know Your Business Processes
Know Your Business (KYB) is a process that verifies the legitimacy of other businesses that a company is dealing with by checking details like ownership and financial status to ensure compliance and prevent fraud. Manual KYB processes suffer from inconsistency because human judgment varies, leading to uneven decision-making and compliance issues. Additionally, as businesses grow and transaction volumes increase, manual verification becomes impractical, causing bottlenecks and reducing operational efficiency.
Manual verification processes may fail to meet regulatory requirements or industry standards consistently. Without proper checks and balances in place, businesses may omit necessary regulations and continue being at risk of facing penalties, fines, or legal repercussions for non-compliance.
Another need for automation is the limited data analysis involved in manual business verification. Manual processes for Know Your Business may not effectively leverage advanced data analysis techniques. Without automated tools to process and analyze large datasets, businesses may miss out on valuable insights that could support decision-making and risk management.
What is Automated Business Verification?
Automated business verification is a revolutionary business verification process in which business legitimacy is tested and verified using highly sophisticated machines/ technologies that will verify business registration details, regulatory compliance, financial records, and other necessary details for establishing a legal business without compromise.
Automated business verification processes demand a low labor force, less time, high flexibility, and are free of errors and compromise. 89% of businesses that use workflow automation report that it has helped them redefine roles and responsibilities. 32% of organizations cite the benefits of reduced human error when adopting workflow automation. Workflow automation increases data accuracy by 88%, which is higher than other document processing methods.
This report shows how businesses can maximize automation and help in every work process to fasten workflow and maximize output in a short time. The question now is how this automation helps in the business verification processes.
How Does Automation Help in the Business Verification Process?
Here’s how automation can amplify verification processes:
- Automated Workflows
- Increased Accuracy
- Process Automation
- Enhanced Compliance
- Decision Making
Automated workflows
Automating business verification helps create a digital solution to help perform routine tasks involved in verification checks. From multiple visits to reliable sources to verify documents to waiting days for a response or having to travel to locations, automated business processes give room for digital verifications where data collections are automated and verified against a large database of registered businesses. This might also include running automatic checks on legal databases or sanction lists to ensure compliance.
For example, these processes include automated data collection, where the system fetches business details such as license numbers and tax IDs from reliable sources like government databases, cross-verifies them, and automatically updates the database.
This process significantly reduces the time and cost per verification. It also allows a more sequential workflow with fewer steps, reducing the complexity of the process.
Increased accuracy
One of the significant benefits of automated business verification is the drastic increase in accuracy and reduced human errors. The verification process involves careful crosschecking of details, numbers, and distinct values, which, when not carefully done, can lead to a series of errors. With complex legal terms and numerous data points to verify, the possibility of errors can never be overemphasized, as mistakes in manual processing are very common. Automation solutions, however, perform the checks based on predefined rules, which can accurately verify and analyze data.
Process automation
Automating the business verification process ensures a smooth and hassle-free process for tedious tasks. This also ensures little labor power as there won’t be a need for many employees to carry out tasks that can be done in minutes by a process automation solution, which needs little or no supervision from humans. It can include setting reminders for when the next verification check is due or integrating APIs that can do real-time verification.
Process automation allows scalability. The manual process is slower, less efficient, tedious, and error-prone compared to the automated processes and does not fit as the business develops due to acquiring more clients and business partners. Automated processes can handle large volumes of data with ease, making them well-suited for a fast-paced growing business.
Enhanced compliance
Automating the business verification process can improve regulatory compliance and the necessary checks against global and area-based sanctions. The automation will give updates and necessary checks against global sanctions, enforcement databases, politically exposed persons (PEPs), or other regulatory lists performed consistently and thoroughly. E-documents can be updated in real time and are easy to audit.
Manual verification is prone to omission and outdating, which can lead to regulatory compliance lawsuits.
Decision making
Automating business verification processes can be designed to generate alerts or flags based on the output of the verification process. This provides decision-makers with clear, prompt information on verification status, enabling faster and more accurate decision-making. Business stakeholders make informed decisions on business collaboration and partnership after seeing the report from the automated business verification system, keeping the flags on for notable information about the business to be onboarded, and avoiding litigation or regulatory compliance lawsuits and fines.
Streamlining Pharmacy Contact Verification with Comidor
To enhance operational efficiency, our client needed a more effective way to verify pharmacy contact details monthly, a task that was time-consuming due to manual cross-referencing of Excel files and websites. By implementing Comidor’s RPA-enabled workflow, the process was fully automated. Data is now retrieved, synchronized, and verified using RPA components, web scrapers, and Excel processors, drastically reducing time and improving accuracy. The system compares entries from an ERP file with verified contact details and fetches updates from relevant websites when discrepancies arise, producing files for matching contacts, non-matching contacts, and those not found, thus streamlining the entire verification process.
Conclusion
Business identity verification is a process that can be tedious, full of errors, and time-consuming when done manually. Automating this process will drastically enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of the verification checks, giving businesses a faster, safer, and less expensive route to maintain their due diligence.
