"Griffin's superior compliance technology has helped us scale and optimise customer onboarding. Compliance best practices are now embedded into every step of our onboarding journey, allowing us to scale fast and provide a better first impression to customers."

About Comma

Bulk paying the boring stuff

Comma is the UK's first bulk payment platform, designed to make it easier for small businesses to pay bills, salaries, and taxes. Founded in 2019 and backed by leading Silicon Valley investors, Comma works with many of the UK's leading banks, accounting firms and bookkeeping providers across the country.

Comma's app connects to accounting systems (Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, etc.) and lets businesses, or their accountants, manage multiple payees in one place. Through open banking APIs, runs can be used by a business to pay all their outstanding payees in minutes with a single bulk payment.

The challenge: finding the right partner to meet their business needs

Scaling the customer experience without compromising compliance

Comma is required to carry out extensive KYB (Know your business) checks when onboarding customers, but this process was manual and time consuming. This approach placed too much pressure on the operations and compliance teams as the company experienced hyper growth. In order to meet customer demand and launch new products quickly, Comma needed to streamline the onboarding process without compromising security and compliance.

"We needed a solution to help genuine customers get through the door faster while keeping it shut firmly to criminals."

When Comma began to explore onboarding solutions, they found most vendors in the market were limited by high, fixed-term pricing, slow API integration, and complex workflow configurations.

The solution: implementing Verify to automate risk management

To scale the business effectively, grow its customer base, and meet its regulatory obligations, Comma needed a solution with intelligent, automated workflows and robust verification capabilities. That's when they discovered Verify, Griffin's automated customer onboarding solution.

Verify has helped Comma streamline its end-to-end customer onboarding processes, providing the company with an API-first, automated platform designed to meet their needs as they grow. Griffin's clear and helpful API documentation with a Postman collection, and a free sandbox environment let the team stress-test the API integration before making any financial commitment.

The Comma team was able to create business onboarding workflows for their Virtual Account and Open Banking products and optimise the sequencing of checks to improve efficiency.

With Verify, Comma automated high volumes of customer onboarding decisions. By setting parameters based on their risk appetite, Comma can automatically accept or decline new customers, while flagging any outliers for further review and enhanced due diligence.

"Verify has enabled us to reduce manual intervention significantly and put the right measures in place to mitigate risk and protect our customers, all without sacrificing our customer onboarding experience."

The results: faster process, better customer experience

Griffin's flexible platform enables Comma to:

• Provide low-risk users with a fast, seamless onboarding experience
• Standardise and automate the due diligence checks
• Automate the risk rating assignment and decisioning
• View detailed check results for every customer and easily create audit trails

As a single solution that satisfies both product and compliance requirements, Verify gives the Comma team greater visibility across the onboarding process. The audit trail keeps track of decisions made - a critical capability for a regulated firm. The result is a simpler and more scalable model for Comma to manage financial crime risk while onboarding customers with minimal friction. Providing the right level of automation and strong risk management has alleviated the burden on both the compliance and product teams.

Results by the numbers:

• A complete API integration in less than two weeks
• Reduction in manual compliance reviews by 70%
• Basic identity and verification checks reduced from 8 minutes to 10 seconds
• The ability to onboard thousands of businesses a month

"We have been thoroughly impressed with Griffin's professionalism and expertise and how well they have come to know and understand our product and needs. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with them."