IAMX x KYC Spider
IAMX is delighted to announce a pivotal partnership with a leading RegTech and digital compliance firm, KYC Spider. The partnership marks a huge step forward, providing IAMX users with reliable and credible Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) processes that meet the strict Swiss data protection regulations. The IAMX Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) solution coupled with KYC Spider’s reputation for trustworthy digital compliance solutions create a key foundation for enabling and incentivising institutional investment.
KYC is the collection of necessary information to verify the identity of prospective customers, practiced and often regulated in the financial services sector. Good KYC practices help to identify and mitigate risk in many circumstances, including identity theft, money laundering, financial fraud, and more. With the correct application, not only can KYC serve to verify a customer’s identity, but their intentions, ahead of a transaction. Where KYC practice involves relationships between businesses and customers, KYB practices are employed to mitigate risk and create trust when establishing business relationships.
You might think of KYC in a limited scope, where only a minimum amount of required information is collected in order to make a purchase that is subject to some form of regulation — the purchase of crypto, for example. The purpose and application of KYC and KYB go well beyond this scenario and serve a vast client base, from banks, to insurance, fintechs, and blockchain.
Though blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cardano have been around for a number of years, the technology is still very new. In this initial building and development phase there are many opportunities for all. While the vast majority of blockchain users engage legitimately, there are malicious actors. One of the greatest concerns from a regulatory perspective is the ability for malicious actors to engage in illegal activity and remain anonymous in the blockchain space. For all the benefits that blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi) bring in terms of privacy and autonomy, it is still considered by many to be unsafe for retail and institutional investors alike. Bad news travels fast, and scams and schemes easily erode trust.
To support widespread adoption of blockchain, it’s important to create a space which is safe and easy for participants. Robust and effective KYC/KYB practices support the manifestation of a safer blockchain space because people are less likely to engage in illegal or otherwise socially destructive behavior when their actions are linked to their identity, even if indirectly. At IAMX, we believe in the right of the individual to maintain sovereignty over their identity, including the ability to choose what aspects of their identity to share, and when. So while we support robust and effective KYC/KYB practices, it doesn’t mean we oppose anonymity. We believe effective KYC models should support the anonymity of participants wherever possible. Ultimately, a market participant should have the ability to remain anonymous until they:
- Enter into a contract requiring select personal data (mobile phone contract, car rental, etc.)
- Start a project which sells assets to end users, where the project has the potential to strongly influence the future value of that asset (token sales, coins, NFTs, etc.), or
- Engages in illegal activity (fraud, money laundering, rugpulls, tax evasion, etc)
Effective KYC/KYB practice establishes legitimacy while allowing the individual to maintain degrees of anonymity. To that end, below is an example IAMX KYC model for a trading platform:
- The user logs into the trading platform using their wallet.
- The platform automatically checks for the appropriate KYC token in the wallet.
- a) If the KYC token reflects compliance with the legal requirements relevant to the platform, the user is granted access to trading.
b) If the KYC token does not fulfill the legal requirements relevant to the platform, or if there is no KYC token present in the wallet, the user is directed to the IAMX KYC/KYB portal to establish or upgrade their KYC status.
In this model, the trading platform is granted access only to the KYC token, but no identifying information, and the user maintains anonymity (zero knowledge proof). The IAMX KYC/KYB portal facilitates the validation of the user’s identity and issues the appropriate KYC token, but the user maintains full sovereignty over his/her identity and identifying information. Users know their clear-text identity data is stored exclusively where the KYC was created.
This is where KYC Spider comes in, as one of the most reputable KYC firms in the space. Due to the breadth and complexity of KYC applications, it has become a field of specialization unto itself. In many circumstances it is no longer cost effective for an organization (like IAMX) to administer their own KYC as it can require considerable time and resource investment to maintain compliance with the increasing number and complexity of relevant laws and regulations. KYC Spider facilitates the entire process, with reliability, integrity, and professionalism.
The IAMX-KYC Spider partnership creates a means to securely onboard retail and institutional investors, growing the ecosystem and making it more appealing to everyone — users, vendors, and investors. In many ways, the partnership is a perfect match: as a multi-blockchain solution with partnerships across the globe, IAMX is able to support KYC Spider’s international growth strategy; while KYC Spider is the ideal KYC provider for IAMX, as a leader in the RegTech sector, offering the most comprehensive solutions for KYB and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. Satisfying regulators and market participants, this partnership supports the blockchain tenets of decentralization, transparency, trust, and security.
About KYC Spider
Founded in 2003 as a joint venture between the compliance law firm MME and the data retrieval university spin-off Eurospider, KYC Spider has become an industry leader in digital compliance, offering intelligent and secure review and identification tools for both customers and suppliers. Whether you want to implement compliance yourself or focus on your business and automate your compliance processes, KYC Spider offers custom-fit solutions to meet the most stringent international regulations.
KYC Spider is a pioneer in the RegTech and ComplianceTech sectors, offering comprehensive compliance software solutions used to improve regulatory processes in the financial services and fintech sectors as well as unregulated industries like luxury goods or real estate. With more than 27 million distinct KYC data records securely stored, customers of KYC Spider rely on its adherence to the strict GDPR and Swiss data protection regulations and standards. KYC Spider actively monitors more than 1’000 lists world-wide for politically exposed persons (PEPs), sanctions, terrorism and crime, in over 204 countries to preventatively identify and mitigate risk, for one of the most secure, fast and reliable KYC compliance platforms available.
About IAMX
IAMX is a token-based SSI and authentication protocol that empowers individuals with the means to own their identity. Adhering to the strictest of regulatory standards for identity protection, IAMX builds on the foundational principles of SSI to provide a robust and secure system where individuals are able to take control and manage their identity. Users of IAMX will realize significant time and cost savings through novel approaches to identity management and ecommerce transactions, like 1-click fulfillment, which are legally binding and maintain local regulatory compliance. With users in control of their identity data, time-consuming processes like KYC and KYB become near instant, highly secure transactions.
IAMX builds upon the foundations of SSI, blockchain, and decentralized identifiers (DIDs), enabling individuals, organizations, or any entity to prove their identity independent of external parties or centralized authorities. This way, the authenticity of anything tied to an IAMX DID can be independently confirmed by the entity holding the DID.
IAMX is at the forefront of the Web3 revolution, bringing the world’s most secure, decentralized, and user-friendly SSI solution to the Internet. Adding the layer of identity and authentication to the Internet, with IAMX you can treat the Internet like you are always logged in. Pursuant to their mission and vision, IAMX is working to solve the problem of providing an identity to the billions of people who do not currently have a state-recognised, legal identity. Using a Biometric Identity Gateway, users with or without state-level identification can create their own identity for use online, one that relies on their unique physical attributes, including their face, iris, and fingerprints.
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