KYC Optimization Improvement Project

4 min readJul 2, 2021

This will help Liquid meet its business objective of becoming the best-regulated exchange in the world and it will help us gain many more valuable users. Currently, we have made a sudden decision to abruptly change our KYC (Know Your Clients) rules. As a result of this our conversion rate has dropped on PTE. What stands is that it is our largest dropoff point for CORP and PTE.

Problems

Currently, our users have several issues they experience during the onboarding process and specifically with the KYC as it is the largest drop-off point in the customer journey. During the KYC process, many users fail to complete part of the KYC process and get exhausted at this point, and give up entirely. We summarized the causes down to a few key reasons.

What problem will this solve for our customers? (Customer problem)

The details of the exact customer problem are too detailed further but one thing is clear. According to the Most Common Issues analysis, KYC is a big pain point for our customers and one of the main reasons they contact customer support:

Required to upload all documents again even if only one fails:

”Thank you.
I think UI could be improved to ask the only missing document to put the link to submit the missing one only rather than saying resubmitting all documents. It could be quite confusing and reasons should come after that rather than up front.”

2. It takes too long to get verified and the user is tired of waiting due to manual intervention required by (causes us to miss out on the FOMO effect of trading)

”Hello yesterday I sent the documentation of my identification to be able to operate on the liquid page, how long does it take to verify it Thank you Regards.”

3. Proof of address requires manual review by the CS team and is the most rejected document type

4. The instructions on UI are not localized and our internal process is not either.

High-Level Approach

The approach of this project is to follow and solve the customer's issues in order of severity. Due to the Proof of address (POA) causing the most issues in the KYC onboarding process by a factor of being the hardest to obtain the document and that which the most amount of manual intervention by the CS team is required — This part will be completed first as it will speed up the process and enabled the deferred POA program. Under this program we expect a user to be able to get verified and deposit crypto or buy crypto with QEX in under a few minutes after sending.

Goals

Automate POI approval and enable the Deferred POA Program.
1,000 USDe a month crypto deposit + withdrawal without a POA.
Enable delta uploads and partial uploads of KYC documents (Separate POI + POA).
Optimize PTE KYC for the top 3 signup countries (October 2020):
South Africa, Korea, UK, Vietnam (STRETCH), Singapore (STRETCH).