Know Your Customer: A Dynamic and Flexible Approach to Compliance

Growing up in Germany and having since lived in Shanghai, Ireland, Italy, and New York City, Claus Christensen—a seasoned IT professional with 30 years’ experience—had to go through the Know Your Customer (KYC) process many times when opening a bank account. Having deemed it time-consuming, expensive, and largely error-prone process because of the manual steps involved, Christensen teamed up with people who had similar experiences within their own businesses. This partnership, which brought together experienced professionals in risk and compliance, technology, finance and law, led to the genesis of Know Your Customer in 2015 to develop an end-to-end digital solution to automate the time-consuming KYC process. Fast forward to today, the company offers a range of sophisticated end-to-end compliance solutions that enable global customers across multiple sectors and countries to automate their compliance process with full regulatory compliance.

Know Your Customer’s mission is to help organizations protect themselves from doing business with companies and individuals involved in money-laundering, financing of terrorism, and financial criminal practices, while modernizing their overall approach to compliance. Until now, there has been clear disconnect between the 19th- century approach to KYC compliance and the 21st-century world we now live in,” says Christensen, CEO of Know Your Customer. Through the power of automation, Know Your Customer helps businesses protect themselves from the risks of unguarded money laundering activities around the world, enabling companies to accelerate growth beyond their home country’s borders. “We empower organizations to adapt to the new regulatory landscape by automating 90 percent of compliance routine tasks and accelerating the on-boarding of new corporate clients from an industry average of 26 days to one day,” he extols.

Know Your Customer integrates its compliance solution with a mobile or browser-based KYC document collection app to perform a military-grade check and ID verification for a fully digital yet completely secure on-boarding experience. This fully integrated KYC solution features a digital document management component, coupled with artificial intelligence, to automate document retrieval and real-time extraction of required information from company registries across the globe. The information is extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and is utilized to automatically map Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) structures across multiple jurisdictions. This reduces the workload on staff and bridges the existing gap between compliance requirements and onboarding needs under global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. The company leverages real-time official government data and cross-checks individual and corporate entities against global crime watch lists to safeguard its clients from potential high-risk customers. “Our value proposition is that we bring organizations’ compliance processes into the 21st century with dynamic, risk-based, scalable, cost-effective and safer solutions,” explains Christensen.

Recently, a top digital banking solution provider with Know Your Customer to automate their corporate client on-boarding process. With smooth customer experience being their core objective, the client also needed a solution that ensures easy usage for business account customers. On integrating Know Your Customer’s technology with the existing on-boarding process through APIs, the client could process a significant number of new businesses customer applications within a day without the compliance team needing additional resources. This enabled the client to perform all AML and KYC checks for corporate entities faster and more cost-effectively while ensuring a smooth customer experience. “Clients use our solutions to effectively harness the agility and capabilities of a digital-first approach as it easily integrates with existing infrastructures via APIs while adapting to the changing AML regulations in realtime,” recalls Christensen.

Scripting similar success stories, the company is constantly enhancing its digital solutions, helping global customers automate their remote on-boarding process even further, while always ensuring full regulatory compliance. A global coverage of compliance solutions and experienced sales representatives in strategic global markets propels Know Your Customer to expand its segmented offering and deliver highly localized outputs across the European and APAC marketplace.