Business transformations for operational resilience amid COVID-19 crisis

The pandemic continues affecting businesses and consumer operations along with having economical and political turmoil globally. Amid all the hype, digital transformation has become substantial for every sized enterprise to continue their activities and ensure customer sustainability in this challenging time. The already digitally active businesses are playing best to their strengths. They are adopting advanced solutions to fight against the risks of digital environment security. On the other hand, the digitally excluded businesses are increasingly pondering digitization to continue the sales and mold strategies according to the global lockdown situation.

Impact of COVID on Enterprises

The lockdown all over the world has halted business operations. Among all, the travel industry is the one badly hit by the lockdown situation. The global travel business sector is expected to compromise a revenue of about 820 billion dollars in which China is actually accounting for nearly half of this loss. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, It noticed a 95% decrease in business travel and it is expected to lose about 404.1 billion dollars of revenue from corporate travel.

As per the analysis report of GlobalData Disruptor Intelligence Center, the enterprises are deploying digital tools to maintain their businesses across a variety of functions such as sales & marketing, supply chain, customer management, and operations & maintenance. The report by the influencer marketing hub shows that an increase in digital consumer buying activities is seen amid coronavirus. A 161.4% increase in the overall supermarket websites’ traffic is noticed during the lockdown which on one hand is a good spike from the sales point of view but on the other hand, increases the chances of an array of digital frauds. 

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3 top online businesses’ operational transformations

1. From manual KYC to eKYC

The pandemic has affected the banking sector and similar businesses whose regular operations require KYC (Know Your Customer) practices for the purpose of customer identity verification. However, the situation does not change the regulatory requirement of KYC compliance for the financial sectors. Instead of manual KYC, businesses can verify their customers online by employing eKYC practice. 

eKYC ensures customer identity verification online through online document verification and video KYC verification process. Through identity documents such as ID card, passport, driving license, etc. financial institutions operating in a digital environment can continue the business operations seamlessly by verifying the customer information through the uploaded document. The process is simple.

The user will upload an identity document online. The system will extract the information from the document (in which Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is used) and verify the information. Another eKYC method corresponds to video KYC in which KYC experts connect the customer on a video call and through a formal conversation conducts the process of customer verification which includes both documents and behavioral verification of the customer. 

2. Payments going contactless

To maintain social distancing, the digital payment services providers have become active as, amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, a spike in online transactions can be seen. A 23% increase in e-commerce transactions is noticed in the period of March 11 to 18. However, during this, the online payment scams have also increased. 22% of respondents are targeted by digital fraud amid coronavirus.

Digital businesses providing payment services to customers require a stronger user authentication method to mitigate the risks of facets of identity fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. The concept of contactless payments emerged from the aim of reducing the spread of coronavirus and decreasing physical contact as much as it could be possible. This increases the demand for digital payment services where people can easily pay bills and transfer funds. The fraudsters roaming in the digital world are vigilant in exploiting loopholes to get illegal benefits in the form of money or free services.