An In-Depth Guide On How To Conduct Employment Verification Check In The UK

Most finance products are not available to unemployed customers. In order to apply for a mortgage, a credit, even to get a car lease, the applicants have better changes to succeed if they are employed. 

What’s next?

Most probably you and your team are busy asking for the right document from your customer.. Verifying your users legitimacy manually and then onboarding them or giving them access to your offering once you have confirmed that they’re genuine customers and not some fraudsters.

But, what happens after the number of users begins to grow? Will the manual checks conducted support the growing number of customers? And most importantly can you keep up with the effort to sort out the documents, review them and accept (or deny) them? Now if you don’t have the right automated solution those questions will be hard to answer. Many fintech brands are losing potential users for that exact reason.  

That’s why in this article, we’re going to show the importance of an automated solution to verify customers employment, and how it works for banks and financial institutions in the UK alongside how Rollee can help you to automate the process.

To be precise, in this guide we'll be diving deep into the following 

1. Why is it hard for people to share their employment data?
2. Employment verification is a must for businesses. Especially in the financial industry.
3. Regulations that are mandated by the FCA for financial institutions to follow through.
4. How Employment Verification Is Done Normally
5. Problems that you’ll face during manual employment verification process
6. Perhaps something easier, automated, and most importantly compliant with both privacy law and FCA’s regulations?
7. How easy it is to get employment verification done with Rollee.
8. Why Rollee is the best choice for financial institutions in the UK looking to outsource and automate employment verification?

Now let’s dive deep.

Looking for accurate, reliable and real-time employment and income activity? 

Book a free demo with us today.

But first … a brief warning: Everyone checks on employment - it’s not a luxury you could avoid but rather a necessity; we’ll be diving deep into why people are experiencing trouble with sharing their employment data. That being said, let's address the most significant issue here.

Why is it hard for people to share their employment data?

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While there are many reasons for this, the majority of the trouble lies in the fact that  today’s workforce does not consist of only the traditional workers with fixed salaries but also freelancers, contractors, and low-income earners without proper documentation.

Common scenarios which make it hard for them to share their employment data properly include 

• being part of the gig economy which makes it hard to prove their past employments
• frequently job-hopping to gain experience which in turn reduces their credibility
• holding multiple part-time or freelancing jobs at once instead of one full-time job
• having low-income jobs that do not have any proper documentations

So, what does all of this mean to you?

Employment verification is a must for businesses. Especially in the financial industry.

While there is a plateful of benefits of conducting employment verification checks, we believe the following two matter the most.

• Helps more people to become qualified leads and increase your conversion rate

Proper employment verification in place can help many deserving people, especially those who are not part of the traditional employment system to access the financial product they need.

• Protect your product from fraud and reduce your default risk 

Imagine what happens if the potential leads is not employed anymore by the company they told you. You wouldn’t be able to accept their credit application, and you would lose precious time.

This is why having a secure and reliable employment verification process helps you to weed out troublesome leads like this. By now, we’re dead sure that you fully understand the importance of employment verification.

Let’s not also forget that employment verification is only one part of the background checks that need to be done to make sure any potential leads that you are trying to provide access to financial services and products are who they say they are. That’s why we have put together a list of

Regulations that are mandated by the FCA for financial institutions to follow through.

1. AML compliance 

FCA requires businesses especially those in the financial industry to ensure AML compliance is met. For those, who’re not familiar, AML compliance is a set of regulations, laws, and procedures intended to prevent money laundering. Here’s a quick overview of the AML compliance requirements that businesses need to fulfil.

• Making risk assessments and implementing a risk-based approach. The FCA requires businesses to identify the type of risks they’ll be facing in terms of their offerings, their clients and where they are doing their business. This is what we call a risk-based approach; where as the risk level increases, the need for verifying the identity increases, and thus more identity checks should be implemented.
• Know Your Customers (KYC). Just like the name states it’s crucial for businesses to identify and verify their customers to make sure they are who they claim to be.
• Implementing and documenting the AML compliance program. The documented AML compliance will outline the steps needed to deal with money laundering and other risks. Plus, the documentation must be always updated.
• Organized management, reporting, and employee vetting. The FCA requires that there’s proper management and structure involved regarding procedures to handle financial crimes. This structure can differ from business to business.Also, it’s also mandated that employees of a business are vetted and trained to detect financial crimes. Likewise, the documents and information gathered during checks conducted should be well documented with copies available. 
• Reporting any suspicious activity to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

2. Customer Due Diligence 

Customer Due Diligence (CDD) must be carried out as part of KYC. The level to implement depends on the situation. There are three levels to Customer Due Diligence.

• Identity Verification

Identity verification is done to get to know your clients and make sure they are who they claim to be. This can be done by verifying their identity documents such as a passport or business registration number if it’s a business.

• Simplified Due Diligence (SDD) 

Simplified Due Diligence (SDD), is conducted when the risk of a customer in question being involved in financial crime is low.

• Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD)

Enhanced Due Diligence (SDD), is conducted when the risk of a customer in question being involved in financial crime is very high. They can be Politically Exposed Person(PEP) or someone under Sanction List.

3. Filing reports

To ensure compliance requirements are met the FCA requires businesses to submit the Annual Financial Crime Report to the FCA online and MLRO Annual Report which is basically an internal report filed by the Money-Laundering Reporting Officer (MLRO) regarding the AML procedures implemented and suggestions to improve them. A Suspicious Activity Report needs to be filled whenever any suspicious activity is noted.

Now that you’re familiar with the regulations that need to be followed by financial institutions in the UK, let’s familiarise yourself with 

How Employment Verification Is Done Normally

• Manually where every check will be done manually with the help of a dedicated team who are professionally trained to do those checks needed. Usually the documents verified are printed payslips or similar documents that are not entirely reliable.
• Outsourced to 3rd party automated solution providers like Rollee which can provide accurate data in matters of minutes.

Now that we’re done with the overall process, let’s have a look at the common

Problems that you’ll face during manual employment verification process

1. Longer time for verification to be completed since it’s done manually where one has to go through multiple contact points and resources to get the employment detail verified.
2. It’s easier to fake credentials and related documents since in most cases there’s a long bureaucratic process involved when trying to verify the origin of a document and many might skip this process altogether. 
3. Not cost-effective as there are high chances that checks will fail and you would have exhausted most of your resources trying to do the verification required manually.
4. If the data collected gets leaked unexpectedly then you might be sued for lack of compliance while storing the data you have collected.

Now is there any better way to do this?

Perhaps something easier, automated, and most importantly compliant with both privacy law and FCA’s regulations?

Well, we’ve got good news for you! The long and tedious process of manually conducting employment verification is now over! We took the manual work out of the employment verification process with Rollee. In one line, we have designed Rollee to provide your business with secured access to real-time employment data.

The best part? It only takes 2 clicks to get employment data from candidates. But more about that later. For now, let’s look at 

How easy it is to get employment verification done with Rollee.

Ultimately, Rollee lets users share their employment data without ever leaving your app or website with a few clicks. Yes, you read that right. Here is how it works. 

1. The user chooses the accounts that they want to connect to.
2. The user then connects their employment account
3. Their account is verified
4. You’ll receive all the data needed

Best of all

You’ll get more accurate employment and income data from Rollee.  

Here’s what we have done to make sure you get more accurate and reliable employment data:

1. Obtaining users’ consent while connecting their accounts via Rollee Connect so that you’re getting the right source to get the data from, that too with their consent and compliant with GDPR.
2. Partnering with payroll providers to enable you to get employment data directly from the source. (only with the user’s consent of course)
3. Secured data collection by making sure all requests for data were sent via HTTPS  to avoid data tampering.

So, why Rollee is the best choice for financial institutions in the UK looking to outsource and automate employment verification?

We know how annoying and time-consuming it is to verify a person’s previous employment details manually. That's why we have built Rollee.

Here are a few things about Rollee that’ll prove it’s the best choice for financial institutions in the UK that are looking to outsource and automate their employment verification process.

1. Get employment data in 2 clicks

Now users or candidates can share their verified employment data with 2-clicks only! All they have to do is simply approve and connect their payroll system to Rollee Connect link provided to them by entering their payroll system credentials.

2. Instant and real-time results 

Rollee makes it possible to get reliable and real-time data from payroll sources to automate the verification process so that businesses and hiring teams can take better and fairer decisions.

Curious about how we make this possible? Check out our API documentation for more info on this.

3. Increase your products’ conversion rate!

Rollee allows more users to onboard effectively since it can easily verify income for those who are not part of the traditional income system such as freelancers and contractors.

4. GDPR compliant 

Since Rollee operates based on users' consent and only uses state-of-the-art encryption protocols to secure and store your data it checks all the requirements of the GDPR law.

5. Super customizable 

A cohesive brand experience is one of the key factors that increase candidates’ trust in your business. That’s why we have made Connect customizable with your brand logo, CTA colors, words in the app’s intro page, and the option to skip to the intro screen for Connect. 

6. Avoid onboarding fraudsters and criminals

Unlike the manual process, there’s little to no opportunity to fake previous employment and income details since we are pulling the data straight from the payroll system.

7. Reduce time to onboard users

Let’s be honest, how many times have you lost your potential users because of your longer verification process?

Think we’re exaggerating?

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Plus with Rollee you will never have to worry about automating your employment verification process.

In a few lines of code, you can add Rollee API to your application or website and integrate it into your workflow based on your needs. Once a user grants access, your application can access her or his employment and income data. 

Ready to automate your employment verification process and get more accurate employment data with Rollee?

Take Rollee for a spin today!

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