KYC in India: the types, and when each applies.
Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process by which regulated institutions verify who a customer is before offering them financial services. In India the framework is set by the RBI's KYC Master Direction, and it comes in several distinct flavours.
The main types
- Full KYC (in-person) — the traditional branch process with physical documents and in-person verification.
- Aadhaar eKYC — electronic verification against the Aadhaar database, typically via OTP or biometrics, used where permitted.
- V-CIP (Video Customer Identification Process) — a live, recorded video session with liveness checks and document display, treated as equivalent to in-person verification under RBI norms.
- CKYC — the Central KYC Registry, where completed KYC records are filed so other institutions can fetch them instead of repeating the process.
- DigiLocker & OCR flows — document collection through issued digital documents or scanned images with automated extraction.
Why onboarding funnels leak
Every extra step in a KYC flow loses applicants. Manual document review adds days; failed OCR forces re-uploads; poorly run video sessions get rejected in audit. The institutions that win onboarding treat KYC as an engineering problem: automate extraction, verify PAN and Aadhaar via APIs, run V-CIP with proper liveness detection, and push records to CKYC automatically — which is what ZyroAI Digital KYC does end to end.