What is KYC/AML and why is it important?
KYC stands for ‘Know Your Customer’ and AML stands for ‘Anti-Money Laundering’. It is the process of a business identifying and verifying the identity of its clients. This regulatory process is becoming more and more common in the ICO space, and for good reason.
First let’s examine what the process involves…
You will typically have to enter some personal information about yourself, such as Name, Date of Birth, place of residency and an upload of an ID document — either passport, driving licence or social security card. This information is then screened against international databases of fraudulent individuals, criminals and politically exposed persons (PEP’s).
At this point the service provider who is performing the screening will return a risk score on the individual for the business to evaluate and decide whether that individual should be permitted to do business with the company.
Sometimes the results are not clear, and further checks would need to be conducted to verify the individual and be satisfied they present no risk. In some cases businesses may simply decide to reject the individual rather than using resources to investigate further.
All this information is then stored securely, including the processes and the decisions the company has taken. This provides good record keeping for the eventuality of a regulatory body looking to investigate the company.
So why is KYC/AML good for the ICO space?
Well, there are several strong reasons for why this regulatory process is a positive one, not just for the projects but for the individuals who participate (even if it is a slight pain to complete).
As we all know, the ICO space has become a bit of a wild west. It’s difficult to determine the good actors from the bad ones. However, a project that is implementing this process demonstrates at the very least they are taking the necessary steps to meeting existing regulatory standards — showing they understand the risks of not doing so. It’s not a straight forward process either and has a significant cost. It’s not a 100% guarantee of the trustworthiness of the project/team, however it adds a little more weight to that argument.
The other factor is it adds protection against future investigations collapsing a newly launched ICO. As we have seen before, some ICO’s that completed successfully have found themselves at the harsh end of some regulatory bodies taking them to the cleaners.
It’s also just the correct and ethical thing to do — you don’t want your contributions mixed up in a project that has accepted funding from criminals or money launderers.
How does this fit in with our project?
Of course, we too have implemented a KYC/AML process. So every person that wishes to contribute in our token sales will need to go through this process.
You can go through this step right now if you are ready, at the following link:
Who is our KYC/AML service provider?
We have partnered with a very respected RegTech company, Cynopsis Solutions PTE, based in Singapore. Their team have a wealth of experience including working for ING Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank & Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Having reviewed many providers, we decided to go with Cynopsis because of their experience and having worked on other successful ICO projects like SimpleToken, VaultBank and Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange.
Have any questions about our project?
Reach out to us at the following:
Telegram: https://t.me/triforcetokens
Twitter: https://twitter.com/triforcetokens
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/triforcetokens
