The costs of complying with due diligence processes like KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) are rising. With financial firms regularly spending 8.4x their average compliance costs on KYC amidst growing client complaints about poor KYC experiences, KYC is becoming a growing balance sheet and relationship management liability. Businesses can benefit from investments in blockchain technology, which underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, to accelerate and distribute KYC compliance operations across shared financial institutions through greater transparency, verifiability, and consensus. It is best that they know their options before making any such investments, though. Below is an overview of the top blockchain solutions that are poised to save businesses time and money on KYC.
Deloitte KYCstart
Deloitte’s bleeding-edge regulatory technology (a.k.a. RegTech), KYCstart, is a KYC-as-a-service solution proof of concept that uses blockchain technology to onboard customers of financial institutions by creating and giving them digital identities that can be used across platforms and institutions. This increases the efficiency of customer onboarding for financial services and reduces the costs of those services. The solution is a necessary one. When financial institutions onboard new customers, their compliance departments must contact, conduct background checks on, and complete forms pertaining to these customers—hence the name “Know Your Customer”. KYC forms cover information ranging from a client’s place of incorporation, regulatory status, litigation, and intended business with the institution. Deloitte’s blockchain-enabled solution, however, involves “regulated KYC added-value service providers” that digitally perform KYC checks for customers looking to be onboarded by a number of financial institutions at once. Given the enhanced verifiability and accountability over data that blockchain technology allows, this could enable people who transact and deal with financial institutions to keep track of their authorizations using smart contracts on the blockchain.
KYC-Chain
KYC-Chain simplifies compliance, using its B2B managed app to streamline compliance team workflows. Its plug-and-play compliance process integration lets compliance teams integrate the software into their workflows, allowing these companies to market their use of the product as if they had created the solution themselves. It also allows them to push data to their own applications to extract information for their partner teams to use. The white-labeled KYC-Chain API, part of KYC-Chain’s Compliance Dashboard and Customer Portal, also allows compliance professionals to either accelerate their companies’ own onboarding experiences for customers or use KYC templates to help teams adapt to changes in the regulatory business climate. That’s not all the Dashboard/Portal product does, though. As part of 2 core products, it also features high-touch outsourced compliance system setup and in-app customer communication, centralizing all communications in one place. KYC-Chain’s second core product, their Bank-Grade Compliance Toolkit, features sanctions screening, identity verification, optical character recognition (OCR) extraction of data from paper documents, biometric scoring, and company registry results integration across platforms.
Tradle
Tradle is a global network that builds trust between financial institutions and their retail, high-net-worth, SME, and institutional clients. This allows them to accelerate their allocation of capital and risk to their various clients. Tradle also takes care of B2B clients’ back-end compliance functions using proprietary blockchain-based bots that automate those processes, which lets financial institutions focus on front-office functions to generate more revenue and grow. As an open-source platform, it is highly transparent, enabling security audits for better trust between financial institutions and their clients. It offers a range of integrated features as well, including biometrics, ID scanning, sanctions and PEP (politically exposed person) checkers to help different kinds of institutions deploy KYC processes faster, more efficiently, and more effectively. Tradle also converts KYC forms into live data, entered data, and shared KYC process data on mobile and desktop.
Large corporations and financial services companies can benefit from integrating blockchain solutions into their KYC and compliance functions. By opening up data provisioning and audit functions across departments, such organizations can improve the efficiency and accuracy of their compliance departments as a whole. What do you think? Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments below.
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