Global attention to the risks connected to money-laundering, financing of terrorism and financial criminal practices has grown exponentially in recent years. As criminals constantly come up with new tactics, global regulators strive to expand existing regulations to identify illicit practices.
In this new, fast-changing landscape, financial institutions are required to closely monitor their new and existing customers to ensure that their infrastructure is not facilitating money laundering or terrorist financing practices. At the same time, more stringent compliance requirements generate higher costs for organisations if they decide to tackle the new challenges with a manual, traditional approach.
At Know Your Customer, we have developed a technology that utilises automation, machine learning, optical character recognition and a wide range of digital solutions to help risk & compliance departments better protect their business against the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing.
However, the implementation of our compliance solution generates an impact on the business that goes beyond the Risk & Compliance department. Our technology:
• Accelerates the time needed to onboard a new corporate client from an industry average of 26 days to 1 day;
• Reduces compliance teams’ manual work by up to 85% by using one centralised platform to carry out all necessary AML and KYC checks;
• Prevents hefty regulatory fines thanks to risk-based rules built into the system, immutable audit trails and quality data sourced only from official company registries, providing the necessary documentary evidence;
• Increases revenue thanks to the reduction in abandoned customer sign-up processes, as a result of seamless customer onboarding experiences;
• Generates considerable savings as a result of the reduction in human errors determined by automation;
• Minimises customer frustration by delivering a fully digital yet completely secure onboarding experience (all solutions integrate with mobile or browser-based KYC document collection app to perform military-grade checks and ID verification).
Unlike other solutions on the market, our technology performs all necessary KYC and AML checks on both individual and corporate customers, centralising the compliance process for organisations of all sizes. The key characteristic of our SaaS platform is its uniquely intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
Any compliance officer – whatever their tech knowledge and experience – is able to navigate our system and, at a touch of a button, immediately identify, investigate and address potential compliance exposures for their business.
The traditional model for checking corporate clients for anti-money laundering purposes is to compile a database of all entities and their beneficial owners. This model allows for fast and cheap access, but it lacks documentary evidence for the stated data points. More importantly, its data is by principle often inaccurate and outdated, making this approach incompatible with full compliance with regulations.
In contrast, we have built Know Your Customer’s solution to include live access to filing documents from official company registries which allows for real-time extraction of truly reliable data. Our approach means that ownership and controlling persons’ information is always accurate as of that minute and audit-ready documentary evidence is always at your fingertips.
Through live connections to company registries from around the world, we are also able to quickly unravel complex company structures spanning across multiple jurisdictions. This unprecedented approach to Ultimate Beneficial Ownership analysis is one of the key reasons for our positioning as a fast-growing global leader in corporate KYC compliance.
Other providers run anti-money laundering checks at the point of entry of new customers; our system automatically runs weekly checks against international watch lists on all individuals and corporates in customers’ databases, ensuring that any changes in situation are flagged in almost real-time.
We understand clients’ needs for fast, reliable technology that can be easily configured and quickly integrated with legacy systems. This is why our solution – which runs on an API-based infrastructure – can be implemented in a matter of days and be seamlessly integrated with existing systems (including companies’ website, mobile app, CRM system).
Know Your Customer was founded by Claus Christensen, Richard Barrett and Cormac Doddy in Hong Kong in September 2015. Thanks to their collective experience spanning from real estate and property development to IT and business strategy, and having listed companies on the London Stock Exchange, the Singapore Stock Exchange and London’s Alternative Investment Market, the three co-founders soon realised that the product that they were building was uniquely positioned to address the needs of the market. Thanks to their cumulative successes as serial entrepreneurs, they have gained deep understanding of global regulations and jurisdictions, which they injected in the new solution from day one. At the same time, their passion and focus on excellence in delivering outstanding customer experiences prompted them to develop a sophisticated yet easy-to-use solution that would have a tangible impact on the world of financial compliance.
Our company is growing fast; we have acquired customers across 11 countries and 9 different vertical markets – including banking (both traditional and virtual), FinTech, insurance, payments, real estate, legal – and we are gaining significant industry recognition:
Frequently featured in global Tier 1 publications, including Forbes, The Sunday Times,
Finextra;
Named in the Top 100 Global RegTech List 2018;
Featured in the Top 20 FinTech Start-Ups in Hong Kong by FinTech News Hong Kong
Selected for numerous accelerators programmes across Europe and Asia
In the first 6 months of 2019 awarded:
o Winners at the ETNet Awards in Hong Kong
o Certificate of Merit for “RegTech, Risk Management and FinTech Security” in the
prestigious HK ICT Awards
o Prize winner at the Dai-ichi Life Innovation Challenge
o “Best RegTech Provider” Award at the European Payment Summit
o “RegTech Project of the Year” at the National Technology Awards
During the past four years, our team has constantly focused on developing a cutting-edge, market-leading solution that truly addresses customers’ needs, yet is flexible enough to adapt to new requirements and industry standards as they are introduced. Our objective is to ensure that our technology stays one step ahead of key trends in customer experience, helping our clients deliver the digital journeys and interactions that their end users now expect from them.