KYC Explained

KYC and the data market, what does it mean?

Every data expert, blogger or data news item is quoting KYC as the new and exciting knowledge base entrant. Although it now has a trendy acronym it has been around for a long time with a few large companies dominating the market for KYC source data.

What is KYC?
Well briefly it’s ‘Know Your Customer’ but peel back the acronym and you have an avalanche of compliance issues that require financial institutions and others to check out who they are going to work with to ensure they ‘Know’ who they are doing business with and that they are not accidentally money laundering for fraudsters, organised crime, listed political activists or terrorists. The institutions that fall foul of this requirement and end up working with one of the above are likely to suffer fines, audits, and loss of reputation.

With all this on the line, in steps the beauty of big data that is the prom queen for all things KYC. KYC doesn’t need to be limited to dancing around a couple of big data suppliers the source of identity management is not only growing but expanding in both breadth and depth as data expands with more individuals identified from a larger digital footprint.

For those of us working in data – managing large volume matching, audit trails, in-depth insights, and normalisation daily – we are all too familiar with the challenges and opportunities of the very data that is grist to the KYC risk management mill.

As with GDPR, the push behind the explosion of KYC products and services is driven by legislation. The combination of both GDPR and KYC will drive evermore services for better data accuracy, faster updates with changes of circumstances and longer, wider audit trails.

Glossary

• KYC – Know Your Customer.
• KYB – Know Your Business this involves verifying the individuals who run the business.
• KYCC – Know your customer’s customer. Your customer may be representing a third party using your services that in turn hides the identity of the end user so the end user must be onboarded also.
• eKYC – This is an electronic version of KYC used in India where the majority of adults are registered with a government identification number.

1 Stop Data is at the forefront of data products including KYC and other essential data sources.

If you need help with KYC, contact 1 Stop Data today.