VerifiEdge, Volume 2 Back to Newsletter

The rapid digitisation of Employee Background Verification Services and its impact on this industry

The last six months has seen a rapid change in the retail / FMCG markets. Quick Commerce which was earlier seen as a non starter has turned out to be a massive game changer. When Zomato acquired Blinkit, the initial reaction was all scepticism. But what a game changer it has turned out to be for Zomato. The Quick Commerce market has exploded with urban India adopting the convenience of ordering from home. So much so that even the original models of food delivery by Zomato and Swiggy are getting disrupted. Both these players have now launched Quick Commerce for food – Bistro by Zomato and Bolt from Swiggy. Others like Flipkart. Amazon, Big Basket are all figuring out their own operating models. D-Mart, the stalwart in grocery retailing for the last few years, is also being forced to react after having underperformed in the market. Services are now increasingly ‘speedified and convenientised’. Make life easy is the game.

The rapid digitisation of Employee Background Verification Services and its impact on this industry

Interestingly, the effects of this are felt in the Background Verification Services world too! The contracted SLAs have become mere data points, and the demand on-the-ground far exceeds the expectations that the documents detail: where they had specified a month for case closure turnarounds, the expectations now stand at half or even less that at the latest! Where digital records can be checked, the turnarounds expected are ‘instantaneous’.

The rapid digitisation of Employee Background Verification Services and its impact on this industry

However, this demand for speed comes with its own challenges. The BGV ecosystem includes multiple players who are not always best equipped to deal with requests on the timelines a client expects. From understanding what a background check entails, to the technological backbone required, and even process orientation, all become challenges to deal with. There is also the unfortunate existence of agencies to deal with that act as a middle-layer between a verification firm and government records – a risk both we and our clients are forced to take on. Of course, feet in the street support for address / new employer verification etc is also vendor driven for all BGV providers.

Lastly, most clients too continue to follow a very manual document collection process from their candidates while onboarding them, which brings in its own levels of inefficiencies. BGV providers are forced to invest in technology to bring down this inefficiency. Given the varied non standardised needs for verification demanded from academic institutions, and even past employers, a lack of comprehensive processes force a back and forth to plug documentation gaps even before verification can be commenced. Individual tracking of cases also becomes that much more complicated.

How are we overcoming these challenges?

We're hardly ones to let challenges be, so here are six areas we have worked on in the past year – to deliver Speed and Convenience!

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Matex 2.0 - Now Live!

The long-awaited upgrade of our proprietary platform Matex – 2.0, is now live and the first batch of clients have been onboarded to this platform. A full transition will be completed in the next couple of months. This should enable better monitoring of cases, make the service executive's lives easier with appropriate MIS etc. This will also enable client portals to be customised as the next step giving them live visibility to case progression.

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Integrations - Making Life Easier

A variety of tech initiatives are also in progress to support this upgrade. This includes use of WhatsApp to communicate with candidates and easier collection of documents, where allowed by our clients. We are also in the final stages of launching an AI based in house tool to cut read times, multiple data formats and cut data entry.

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Doubling the Force

Our physical verification network has doubled in the last quarter, filling gaps in several states and remote locations.

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More Vendors + More Security

Wherever we believe we have ‘reliable vendor partners’ and trustable academic institutions we have cautiously increased working with them. A parallel audit and monitoring mechanism is put in place where we use vendors for academic verifications.

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More People + More Closures

Multiple internal change initiatives have been accelerated. HR policies have been strengthened to incentivise faster closure. We continue to actively decentralise operations to our branches across the country. In parallel we have added close to 100 odd employees to speed up processing.

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Infra Upgrades Galore

From data privacy updates, to Cybersecurity Audits and BCP mechanisms... a lot!