KYC needs to be an integral and constantly evolving part of our work culture

KYC and KYB (also KYCC ‘know your corporate customer’) are processes that help to prevent fraud and money laundering, but it is only truly effective if it is consistent.

The immense need for KYC specialists has made it difficult to hire at the required speed and amount. With digital possibilities, fraud has had new ways of expanding to which manual verification has little to no opposing impact. Technology can offer a solution but, in many ways, fraudulent behavior seems to reinvent itself.

Victoria Saue, the COO of Entify that concentrates on offering KYC solution to companies, says there are still ways to ensure business is done in a compliant manner with real and verified customers. This aim is also the core of KYC, which market is estimated to grow to $ 11.8 billion in 2022, according to the analytic agency OWI.

“Imagine that you are a person with ill intentions. The pattern in which you are operating, must be unexpected to cash in, right? Those people take their actions very seriously and commit to it as their full-time job, constantly coming up with new ways to beat the systems they already are familiar with.

So if detecting fraud is not your main job, you might make a couple of searches, zeal a few deals and establish trust. That is, though, when the fraudster makes their move. They change their behavior patterns, move to different industries, prolonging the processes and it is difficult to keep up with them. They are the “experts” in their field, that is their job. And it should be yours too, even if your full-time job is to grow your business,” Saue points out.

The industry is diverse with risks and constant changes in legislation. Even the constantly improved and updated requirements are not entirely sufficient to stop money laundering. “It is evaluated that only around 1–2% of all money laundering cases get detected. Your KYC/KYB process cannot be a one-time thing. It needs to be an integral process and a way of doing business if we want to fight money laundering and detect fraud,” Saue stresses.

Peeter Puppart, the Co-Founder and Board Member of SupplierPlus states that when times are rough, we need to know who to trust. He says their processes have been fully automated and that is one of the key elements in coming out of the situation we have been seeing during the last months. “What we have always been keen on is the automation processes, which helps us to understand some of the important questions, such as what can be improved or what timeline shortened. In our experience, automating the verification process in onboarding has brought us a strong competitive advantage, which we have implemented in our customer’s processes as well.”

Entify offers a fully automated real-time digital verification process that helps businesses detect fast and securely risks of doing business with different people and companies. The company enables verification in over 195 countries.