Lenders keeping their existing LMS
Adopt onboarding on its own and forward approved applications into the system that already owns your loan book.
Acquire · Bankify module
Digital loan onboarding, from first message to a document-checked application
Onboarding is where most lending applications die — a missing payslip, an expired ID, a form abandoned halfway. Bankify Digital Onboarding closes those gaps by capturing applications where the customer already is, checking documents as they arrive, and handing approved applications straight into a loan management system. Yours or ours.
Capture applications where the customer already is
An application form on a website only reaches customers who visit the website. Bankify captures the same application across several channels into one record, so a customer who starts a conversation on WhatsApp and a customer who fills in a web form produce the same reviewable application with the same evidence attached.
- Web, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, mobile, and staff-entered applications
- The originating channel is recorded on the application
- Structured WhatsApp forms where the channel supports them, conversational capture where it does not
- One live application per product per calendar month, so duplicates are caught at submission
Document checks that pre-load the reviewer’s checklist
Documents are read on upload by an OCR pipeline and turned into four explicit checks. These are advisory by design: they populate a reviewer’s checklist rather than deciding, and a timeout or an unreadable scan degrades to "needs manual review" rather than a rejection. A customer is never auto-declined by an OCR result.
- Classification — is the document the type it was uploaded as
- Identity — does the ID number extracted from the document match the customer profile
- Freshness — identity documents flagged past expiry, proof documents flagged when the document’s own date is older than 90 days
- Income consistency — extracted pay against stated salary, within a tolerance that defaults to 15% and is tunable per institution
- Each check resolves to pass, flag, pending or error — never to an automatic decline
Documents that reflect how real customers prove things
A proof-of-address rule that only accepts a utility bill excludes a large share of the customers microfinance institutions actually lend to. The accepted evidence list is deliberately broad, and expiry is handled as a rule rather than a reviewer’s memory.
- Identity, proof of address, proof of income and passport photograph
- Proof of address accepts utility bills, bank or building-society statements, a lease, an employer letter, a sworn affidavit, or a councillor’s or headman’s letter
- National ID never expires; other documents are treated as valid for 90 days from upload
- Corporate pack including CR14, CR6, certificate of incorporation, memorandum and articles, tax clearance and a borrowing resolution
- Uploads accepted as JPG, PNG or PDF
An application state machine that refuses invalid transitions
Applications move through an explicit, enforced set of states. Invalid transitions are rejected rather than logged as warnings, which is what stops an application quietly reaching "approved" without ever having been submitted. There is deliberately no "in review" state — review happens on the submitted record.
- Draft, submitted, approved, forwarding, forwarded — plus rejected, forward failed and abandoned
- Transitions are asserted; an invalid move raises an error rather than being recorded
- Append-only event timeline, with each entry attributed to a user, a customer, the bot, a service or the system
- Submission re-evaluates requirements, refuses an incomplete application unless explicitly forced, and stamps a point-in-time KYC snapshot
- Corporate applications cannot be approved unless the applicant is a verified representative of the business
Forwarding into the loan system you already run
This is what lets an institution adopt onboarding without replatforming. An approved application is forwarded to whatever system owns the loan book — Bankify’s own lending engine, or a third-party LMS reached over REST with a per-institution field mapping. Delivery is durable rather than fire-and-forget.
- Internal connector that books the loan directly in Bankify Loan Management
- Generic REST connector with a per-institution mapping from your field names to canonical ones
- API key, basic or bearer authentication, with credentials encrypted at rest
- Durable outbox with exponential backoff, retry limits, and recovery of forwards left stuck in flight
- An unconfigured or inactive destination parks the application for manual handling rather than failing silently
An audit trail that survives the question "who approved this?"
Every state change, every document, every check result and every forwarding attempt is attributed and timestamped. That is the difference between being able to answer a regulator’s question about a specific application and reconstructing it from memory.
- Reference generated per application and carried through to the receiving system
- Append-only event log per application, never edited in place
- The KYC evidence as it stood at submission, snapshotted rather than re-derived later
- Manual forward and retry, plus a connection test against the destination system
Keep the LMS you already run
Digital Onboarding isn’t locked to Bankify’s own lending engine. Point it at your existing LMS and every approved application forwards straight in — no migration, no re-platforming your loan book to adopt it.
Who it’s for
Microfinance institutions
Reach customers without a branch visit, and accept the proof of address they can actually produce.
Banks and fintech lenders
Cut abandonment on the application form and give credit teams a checked file rather than a pile of attachments.
Where this fits in the platform
The same application runs as loan onboarding over WhatsApp, where a customer quotes, enrols, uploads documents and signs with a PIN without leaving the chat.
Approved applications forward into Bankify loan management software, or into the loan system you already run.
Institutions onboarding at volume without branches usually arrive here through microfinance software.
Once a loan is live, arrears are handled by loan collection software rather than by chasing a spreadsheet.
Frequently asked questions
Does Bankify automatically approve or decline applications from the KYC checks?
No, and this is deliberate. The document checks are advisory: they pre-populate the reviewer’s checklist and never block an application. If the OCR service times out or a scan is unreadable, the check degrades to "needs manual review" rather than producing a decline. A human makes the decision.
What documents can a customer use as proof of address?
A utility bill, a bank or building-society statement, a lease, an employer letter, a sworn affidavit, or a councillor’s or headman’s letter. The list is broad on purpose, because a utility-bill-only rule excludes a large share of real borrowers.
How long do KYC documents stay valid?
A national ID does not expire. Other documents are treated as valid for 90 days from upload, and a proof document whose own date is older than 90 days is flagged for the reviewer.
Can Digital Onboarding forward into a loan system that is not Bankify?
Yes. A REST connector posts the approved application to your endpoint using a per-institution mapping from your field names to canonical ones, with API key, basic or bearer authentication and credentials encrypted at rest. Delivery uses a durable outbox with retries rather than a single attempt.
What happens if the receiving system is down when an application is approved?
The forward is queued and retried with exponential backoff up to a retry limit, and forwards left stuck in flight are recovered automatically. If the destination is not configured or is inactive, the application is parked for manual handling rather than failing quietly.
The rest of the platform
Loan Management
Configurable products, automated disbursement, and the full loan lifecycle in one book.
Core Banking
Double-entry ledger, multi-currency accounts, and real-time reconciliation at the core.
Collection Intelligence
Risk-scored queues, automated recovery strategies, and promise-to-pay tracking.
Want to see this against your own loan book?
Talk to a product specialist about which modules fit your institution today.