Perpetual KYC

What is Perpetual KYC?

Typically used to comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations, perpetual KYC offers a digital-first approach to due diligence and compliance requirements, which require companies to maintain accurate and up-to-date profiles about their clients.

• Periodic KYC refresh has now become insufficient on its own due to higher costs and lower levels of customer satisfaction
• Continuous risk monitoring (also known as perpetual KYC) has the ability to fill these gaps and provides an edge in the form of risk reduction and elimination of friction.

This process does not mitigate the necessity for ongoing periodic refresh, but instead compliments processes already in place. With perpetual KYC, you are alerted as soon as the risk appears, allowing you to take decisive action, quickly.

Continuous Risk Monitoring Challenges

While 24/7 continuous risk monitoring could be considered the ultimate KYC defense, it is fraught with challenges:

• Will it create another SARs type headache – lots of alerts that turn out to be false positives?
• Can a solution combine monitoring of media sources as well as databases like watchlists or company information?
• Will analysts be inundated with previously known intelligence about the client and multiple reports from multiple sources about the same piece of information for days on end?
• Will alerts be of sufficient criticality to merit real time alerting?
• Will it require big capital investments or significant increases in operating expenditure such as content or people costs?

smartKYC’s sophisticated KYC solution addresses each of these challenges.

With smartKYC’s award-winning technology you will not only receive alerts on material changes to client risk profiles as reported in corporate databases, registries or open web media but we also ensure those alerts are relevant, genuinely new information and are delivered with appropriate timing.

smartKYC’s Solution to Perpetual KYC

smartKYC not only looks for specific event types in structured sources, such as registry filings, but it also discriminates between types of adverse media hits that might indicate involvement in financial crime or misconduct. Events can be classified based on criticality so that alerts and their escalation pathways reflect client risk policy.

By using other identifying attributes like age, nationality and company affiliation in the search rather than name only, all hits, including those from media sources, can be scored for relevance, regardless of the language of the article.

smartKYC’s strength in eliciting facts from media content ensures an intelligence baseline is created at the onboarding stage. This means that new continuous risk monitoring alerts comprise genuine ‘net new facts’ rather than the endless repetition of prior knowledge.

Using perpetual KYC, companies can quickly detect any new changes about a client that would usually go unnoticed.

Discover our Automated KYC Solution

If you’re interested in learning more about how smartKYC’s automated KYC software can transform the efficiency and effectiveness of your KYC and enhanced due diligence operations, book your demo today.