smartKYC is proud to announce that we have been named the winner of Most Innovative KYC Investigation & Due Diligence solution at the A-Team Insight Innovation Awards 2026.
The A-Team Innovation Awards, now in its sixth year, celebrates the projects, teams and technologies driving meaningful change across capital markets, spanning data management, trading technology, ESG and RegTech. Crucially, winners are not selected by public vote. They are chosen by the A-Team editorial team and an Innovation Advisory Board made up of senior executives from leading financial institutions and technology firms — the people closest to the operational realities our customers face every day.
Why this category, and why it matters
KYC investigation and due diligence is where the hardest compliance work happens. It is where unstructured information such as; adverse media, sanctions exposure, ownership networks, and Source of Wealth signals, must be turned into a defensible risk decision, often under regulatory pressure and within tightening service timelines. Doing it well at scale, across thousands of subjects, in multiple languages, has historically been almost impossible without proportionate growth in headcount.
That is the problem smartKYC was built to solve. Our platform fuses AI with linguistic and cultural sensitivity and deep domain knowledge to automate open-source intelligence (OSINT) collection across the deep web, news archives, watchlists, sanctions lists and corporate registries. Through our modules, we automate the most time-consuming and complex aspects of investigation while keeping the analyst firmly in control of the risk decision.
What the judges recognised
This award recognises the parts of our work we are most proud of:
- Depth of investigation: multilingual, multi-source intelligence drawn from licensed databases, regulatory and sanctions lists, corporate registries and the open and deep web.
- Signal, not noise: AI-driven adverse media classification and entity resolution that filter genuine risk indicators from surrounding noise and reduce false positives.
- Auditability and explainability: every conclusion is traceable to its source, every workflow configurable to the institution’s risk appetite, and every AI inference designed to be defensible to a regulator.
- Real outcomes: analyst time reclaimed, onboarding cycles shortened, and material risk surfaced earlier and more consistently across the customer lifecycle.
From A-Team Group
“We are delighted to recognise smartKYC as the winner of the Most Innovative KYC Investigation & Due Diligence in the 2026 A-Team Innovation Awards. Our awards are designed to honour the industry leaders who set new benchmarks in financial services by delivering high-value, transformative solutions. The quality of entries this year was exceptional, making smartKYC’s win a significant testament to their dedication and creative excellence in the industry.”
From smartKYC
“We are honoured to receive the Most Innovative KYC Investigation & Due Diligence award at the A-Team Innovation Awards 2026. Investigation and due diligence is the hardest part of KYC — it is where unstructured intelligence has to become a defensible decision. To be recognised for our work in this specific discipline, by an Innovation Advisory Board drawn from the institutions we serve, is a particularly meaningful validation of where we have invested. We share this recognition with our customers, whose feedback shapes the platform every day, and with the smartKYC team who continue to push the standard of what explainable, AI-driven due diligence can do.”
Thank you
Our thanks to A-Team Group, the editorial team and the Innovation Advisory Board for this recognition. Thank you to our customers — financial institutions across capital markets, banking and private wealth — whose work and feedback shape the product every day. And thank you to the smartKYC team, who continue to set new standards for KYC quality while transforming productivity and hardwiring compliance conformance.
The full list of A-Team Innovation Awards 2026 winners is published on the official winners landing page.
See smartKYC’s Award Winning Platform in Action
Through the automation of deep KYC background checks on companies and people, smartKYC uses explainable AI to do the research heavy lifting that a human would normally do — at speed, at scale and across more than 40 languages.
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