Five actions to take now to ensure a smoother KYC process

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Know Your Customer (KYC) checks are a vital legal requirement for financial institutions, but these days, knowing who you’re dealing with is harder than ever. With the rise of identity theft, synthetic IDs, and money mules as well as a plethora of sophisticated and ever-changing scams, any account that’s opened and each transaction has the potential to be fraudulent.  

Ensuring your KYC process is robust and runs smoothly is critical to protecting customers and your business and stamping out fraud risk. Increasingly, that means relying on technology when onboarding new customers and on an ongoing basis to secure data and gain powerful insights. With the right tech tools you can gather information that is accurate, complete, and up-to-date so that you can build a clear picture of the person concerned, verify their IDs with confidence, and mitigate risk. To ensure your KYC process is as effective and efficient as possible: 

1. Delve into public records

Scouring the internet is the obvious way to find out information about someone, but it can be incredibly time-consuming and fraught with potential to go down a blind alley, uncover incorrect information or miss something altogether.  

Searching public records databases such as credit statement headers, bank headers and vehicle registration databases to match the information given by a customer to verifiable sources is a much more effective way to confirm they are who they say they are during the KYC process. Tech tools can be customized to let you to target searches or filter results as required, and they can be set up to deliver alerts to notify you of key changes, such as to social security numbers, death records, or sanctions listings. They can even provide risk scoring to help you make decisions about onboarding new customers in line with your bank or credit union’s risk tolerance profile. 

2.Boost your ID verification capabilities

How can you be sure that the ID a potential customer gives you checks out during the KYC process? Their drivers’ license or passport image may look authentic but is it really theirs, and could it be fake? Tech tools can help you solve this conundrum, for example by allowing a subject to take a photo of their ID and a selfie, and then running in-depth checks on both, including deploying biometrics, forgery checks and electronic document verification techniques. 

3. Use advance screening for higher risk subjects

Some people require extra vigilance – for example, they may be subject to sanctions, be a politically-exposed person (PEP) or have business connections you should be aware of. So advanced screening tools that can deliver live adverse media results about that person at the touch of a button, and provide alerts about flagged individuals if new press coverage appears or changes are made to sanctions, PEP or state-owned entities (SOE) lists, are invaluable for proper due diligence during the KYC process. 

4. Fight fire with fire on digital ID fraud

Digital fraud such as account takeover (ATO) attempts and synthetic ID fraud, where criminals create fictious identities to open accounts, is rife, and financial institutions should fight fire with fire. Such activity is far more likely to be spotted and stopped in time using digital solutions that can leverage device data, detect malware, deploy behavioral analytics, identify suspicious patterns, flag anomalies and ultimately deliver intelligence on potential threats in real time. 

The key here is that tech tools should deliver data that is meaningful and actionable, using data analytics to sort the data, track trends, and put the information they provide into context, including highlighting factors that suggest everything is – or is not – as it seems. Armed with this insight, you will be in the best position to identify threats as they happen, and to continuously improve your onboarding KYC processes by understanding where weaknesses lie and what are the biggest threats you face. 

5. Make sure your tech tools are connected

Tech tools such as the ones mentioned above are powerful aids to combat different areas of risk, but they become turbocharged when used together in an integrated way to deliver a comprehensive KYC overview. The solutions you use must not only be capable of locating, analyzing and checking different pieces of information: they should be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together to create a clear, well-rounded picture of the individual or business concerned. Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud solutions are designed to do just that: their value in their own right is multiplied when they are connected. 

From onboarding and beyond, you need information that is accurate, complete and up-to-date so that you can mitigate risk right from the get-go. Technology can provide multiple layers of security to help you uncover and block hidden threats, confirm or remove suspicions, and make sure you can demonstrate you Know Your Customer.  

Easy-to-use, accurate and comprehensive tech solutions are a must to deliver smooth, robust KYC processes. Learn about how Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud solutions can help your organization streamline and strengthen KYC or read our white paper “Building digital trust into your onboarding tech stack”. 

Thomson Reuters is not a consumer reporting agency and none of its services or the data contained therein constitute a ‘consumer report’ as such term is defined in the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), 15 U.S.C. sec. 1681 et seq. The data provided to you may not be used as a factor in consumer debt collection decisioning, establishing a consumer’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, government benefits, or housing, or for any other purpose authorized under the FCRA. By accessing one of our services, you agree not to use the service or data for any purpose authorized under the FCRA or in relation to taking an adverse action relating to a consumer application.