Onboarding new users, employees, or partners into your institution is rarely a smooth process. It often involves long verification times, outdated manual processes, and strict compliance requirements that slow everything down. Each delay adds frustration, increases costs, and creates unnecessary bottlenecks that impact operational efficiency.
But what if there was a better way?
Verifiable credentials (VCs) offer a modern approach to digital identity that can significantly improve institutional onboarding. By replacing slow, error-prone methods with instant, secure, and verifiable digital credentials, institutions can simplify their workflows, reduce fraud, and improve user experience. In this article, we’ll break down the three biggest challenges in institutional onboarding and explain how VCs can help you overcome them.
Institutional onboarding is the process of verifying and integrating new individuals (whether thats employees, students, customers, or business partners) into an organization’s system. It’s a necessary but often complex task that requires identity verification, security checks, and compliance with legal and industry regulations.
Just think of what it must be like for a university or college to enroll an entire new cohort of students, from around the world, each with different requirements, documents, courses, etc.
For many institutions, onboarding is a slow and painful process due to outdated verification methods, heavy reliance on manual paperwork, and the ever-evolving landscape of regulatory compliance. These inefficiencies lead to lost time, higher administrative costs, and a frustrating experience for users who just want to get started.
Now, let’s break down the three biggest onboarding challenges institutions face and how verifiable credentials can solve them.
Verification is the cornerstone of onboarding, but traditional methods are far from efficient. Many institutions still rely on manual document review, requiring new users to submit physical or scanned copies of passports, ID cards, proof of address, and other credentials. These documents must then be checked against databases, verified for authenticity, and cross-referenced with other sources.
This manual approach introduces multiple problems:
How Verifiable Credentials Help:
With VCs, the entire verification process can be automated and significantly accelerated. Instead of relying on manual document checks, institutions can issue and verify digital credentials instantly. These credentials are cryptographically signed and tamper-proof, ensuring authenticity without the need for slow, human-led verification.
For example, a university could issue a VC-based student ID that can be instantly verified by employers, banks, or service providers, eliminating the need for paper transcripts and letters of confirmation. Similarly, financial institutions can use VCs to verify the identity of new customers without requiring them to repeatedly submit and re-submit physical documentation.
Many institutions still rely on outdated, paper-based onboarding processes. Whether it’s filling out forms, collecting physical signatures, or scanning and uploading documents, manual tasks significantly slow down onboarding and increase administrative burdens.
Consider how traditional hiring works: a new employee must complete various forms, provide identification documents, submit background checks, and wait for HR to manually process everything before they can start work. Not only is this time-consuming, but it also increases the risk of lost paperwork, incorrect data entry, and compliance errors.
How Verifiable Credentials Help:
By digitizing identity verification and onboarding workflows, VCs eliminate the need for repetitive manual processes. Institutions can issue secure, verifiable digital IDs that individuals can store in a digital wallet and present when needed. These credentials can be instantly checked and accepted without requiring manual intervention.
For example, in healthcare, a hospital onboarding a new doctor can instantly verify their medical license and credentials from a regulatory body through VCs, instead of requesting multiple paper documents. This means faster hiring, reduced administrative overhead, and a streamlined experience for all parties involved.
Regulatory compliance is a major challenge in onboarding, especially for institutions operating across different jurisdictions. Each region or industry has its own set of regulations governing identity verification, data protection, and fraud prevention. Failing to meet these requirements can lead to hefty fines and legal issues.
For example:
Traditional compliance processes are often labor-intensive, requiring institutions to manually collect, verify, and store sensitive data while ensuring that every step meets regulatory requirements. This adds layers of complexity, making onboarding even more tedious.
How Verifiable Credentials Help:
VCs provide a secure, standardized way to issue and verify credentials that meet compliance requirements without requiring institutions to store and manage sensitive personal data themselves. Because VCs use cryptographic signatures, they allow instant verification while reducing the risk of fraud or identity theft.
For instance, a financial institution can verify a customer’s identity using a government-issued digital credential without storing a copy of their personal information, reducing regulatory risk while maintaining compliance.
Onboarding should be a smooth and secure process, not a frustrating bottleneck. By replacing outdated verification methods, eliminating manual tasks, and simplifying compliance, verifiable credentials offer a modern solution that benefits institutions and users alike.
With VCs, institutions can:
At Vidos, we’re helping institutions modernize their onboarding processes with cutting-edge digital identity solutions. If your institution is ready to move beyond slow, manual, and inefficient onboarding, now is the time to explore verifiable credentials.
Contact us today to see how Vidos can transform your onboarding experience and make digital identity work for you.
