Footprint launched with the idea that companies need not rebuild the same onboarding flows endlessly. What does it mean to build an onboarding flow? You of course need product design, visual design, and basic front-backend connections — but it’s so much more than that.
For products and companies that rely on trusting their users, onboarding is essential and must be done right — it’s where fraudsters are stopped, accurate identity is verified, and data is securely transferred. Every businesses that wants to know it’s customers needs to thinking about what information to collect, make sure the person onboarding owns that data, and securely store down their PII for auditors, regulators, and financial partners.
So how does Footprint help companies offload the complexity of onboarding?
Footprint Embedded Onboarding
We started by building an embeddable (and host-able) onboarding flow with hundreds of variables of customization to give companies the ability to deploy a full end-to-end onboarding flow in minutes rather than weeks or months.
This is the corner stone of Footprint — many customers use this embedded flow to simplify their product onboarding and solve identity in just a couple lines of code.
However, a portion of customers had more complex onboarding/customer enrollment — some of the data they’ve already collected like maybe a name, email, phone or an address — how do you enable businesses to deploy a combination: use their already in place form for collecting some of the identity and offload to Footprint for the more complex kinds (SSN, Document verification, etc)?
Bootstrap
The Footprint SDK needed to get smarter — so we deployed what we called “bootstrapping” onboarding data. Now you can collect whatever subset of attributes you want and simply pass them to the Footprint SDK upon launch. The Footprint embedded experience would start but would intelligently hide/fill-in the parts of the identity verification experience that was previously already hydrated by the bootstrapped data. In some sense, this provides you with the best of both worlds but it comes at a cost.
To bootstrap or not?
Footprint’s embedded experience does a lot more than meets the eye. Inputs and user behavior are captured and analyzed for fraudulent behavior, form fields like address, SSN, and more are heavily optimized to ensure high-verification accuracy. For instance, we don’t let users enter a P.O. box or warn the user about mistyping of a birth year — all to ensure that while we have the user on screen we get them to provide the most accurate data possible.
Furthermore, the embedded experience can automatically identify a user who is already known by Footprint to fast track their identity verification. If the data was already bootstrapped this could mean we could have saved the user clicks and key presses and lowered their onboarding friction.
Footprint has hundreds of these types of optimizations, anti-fraud prevention, and more hiding behind the simple embedded experience to power highly accurate yet low friction onboarding.
Introducing: Onboarding Components
To finally solve this problem — that lets every product team maximize their ability to control, customize, and sequence their onboarding flow while leveraging the full magic of Footprint — we’re introducing Onboarding Components.
Onboarding Components take all the magic that resides within the Footprint embedded onboarding and exposes them as individual web/React components you can embed, fully stylize, and control inside your product.
Whether you are upgrading your onboarding form to leverage Footprint or just starting to build it from scratching, Onboarding Components makes it as easy as replacing your input fields with the equivalent Footprint components. Think of Onboarding Components as drop-in replacements for your existing fields.
Replacing your fields with Onboarding Components supercharges your onboarding flow to:
- Offload the data security and secure transport to vault sensitive PII
- Integrate state-of-the-art fraud and behavioral analysis tools to keep bad actors out
- Real-time validation and input accuracy to make sure users are entering the right information
- Low-code/no-code one-click identification to lower friction and auto-fill user data
- Seamless integration with Footprint’s verification engine to offload complex backend KYC integrations
- Automatic, No-Code dynamic step-ups like Document and Selfie verification based on configurable Rules in Footprint
- Seamless handoff to the embedded Footprint flow for onboarding components you don’t want to control (i.e. Visa questions, SEC broker questions, Document & Selfie, etc).
With Onboarding Components, you can achieve the best of both worlds — a tailored onboarding experience that minimizes friction, maximizes accuracy all while giving you full control to fully own your own onboarding flow.
