A Study on the Impact of AI-Driven KYC Verification on Customer Onboarding Efficiency in Digital Payment Platforms

Dr. Vinod Krishna M U Abhishek Channappa Borakanavar

Digital payment platforms have witnessed rapid growth over the past decade, and customer onboarding has emerged as a critical determinant of user acquisition and retention. Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, a mandatory regulatory requirement, has traditionally been a slow, manual, and error-prone process. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as optical character recognition, facial recognition, liveness detection, and machine learning has transformed KYC verification into a fast, accurate, and secure process. This study examines the impact of AI-driven KYC verification on customer onboarding efficiency in digital payment platforms. The objective of the study is to analyze how AI-based verification affects onboarding speed, accuracy, security, and customer experience, while also identifying the associated challenges. The study adopts a descriptive research design based entirely on secondary data collected from academic journals, industry reports, and regulatory publications. The findings reveal that AI-driven KYC substantially reduces onboarding time, improves document verification accuracy, strengthens fraud detection, and enhances overall customer satisfaction, although concerns relating to data privacy and algorithmic bias remain. The study concludes that AI-driven KYC verification is a critical enabler of efficient and secure customer onboarding, and its continued refinement will play a decisive role in the future of digital identity verification within the financial services sector.