Reducing inefficient, resource-intensive corporate onboarding with KYC-Chain

Onboarding corporate customers can be a long, complex, and often disruptive process for businesses that manually undertake their compliance checks. Using KYC-Chain’s end-to-end workflow solution, companies can now carry out extensive KYC checks in a matter of minutes. 

Here’s our short monthly update for your quick read:

Businesses that count other companies among their customer base require Corporate KYC.

Basic Corporate KYC information can include:

• Understanding who controls a corporate entity – its Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) or Persons of Significant Control (PSC)
• The jurisdiction it is registered in
• Whether it is a fully licensed and registered entity

Additionally, it is also often essential to carry out Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) on businesses flagged as potentially risky. EDD is a Corporate KYC process that can include analyzing whether a corporate entity:

• Is connected or does business with any sanctioned parties or in sanctioned jurisdictions
• Has a history of legal sanctions or fines
• Is featured in any adverse media or watchlists

Inefficient Corporate KYC: Expensive and Time-consuming

Banks and other regulated organizations’ traditional approach to corporate KYC has traditionally involved carrying out due diligence on potential corporate customers using time- and resource-intensive manual processes. This tends to involve a company’s internal compliance team(s) conducting manual research of multiple government registers, sanctions watchlists, and adverse media databases to identify whether a prospective corporate customer poses a risk from a regulatory standpoint.

This is particularly the case when dealing with small or new businesses with less identifiable history or track records. 

Another major challenge of manual CDD/KYC is drawn-out periods of onboarding. According to a February 2021 article in Finextra, it takes FIs an average of 3-4 months to successfully onboard a corporate customer. 

While KYC-Chain is known for its advanced KYC checks for individuals, our end-to-end workflow solution also boasts powerful Corporate KYC features to ensure the corporate customers you onboard will not cause you any regulatory problems. It also makes the process incredibly fast. 

Let’s take a look at how KYC-Chain’s Corporate KYC capabilities work.

KYC-Chain: Corporate KYC

KYC-Chain’s Corporate KYC solution helps businesses and organizations adhere to new and existing AML/KYC and CDD requirements. 

Our end-to-end workflow solution is automatically configured to be able to screen both individual and corporate entities. Once a potential corporate customer has initiated the onboarding process, our automated solution checks its name against a large list of over 160 million entities across 139 national corporate registries.

At the same time, our tool checks the entity’s names and UBOs against global watchlists that include government databases of sanctioned entities, Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), and other identifiers informed by AML best practices. 

Our instant access to government registers and public records includes the ability to retrieve official company documents in order to conduct EDD on a company’s history when required. These capabilities allow KYC-Chain clients to instantly verify a business and its UBOs through one seamless workflow.

Corporate Risk Scoring

One of the most powerful tools of our end-to-end workflow solution is our advanced risk scoring. KYC-Chain’s risk scoring allows our clients to build detailed and comprehensive risk profiles of their potential customers, which allows our clients to take a risk-based approach. For executing corporate KYC on corporate entities, our tool can allow you to first build an automated risk profile before passing medium to higher risk profiles onto your human compliance teams to evaluate further.

This risk-based approach significantly reduces the burden on your human compliance teams while ensuring you maintain robust and compliant AML protocols. Additionally, KYC-Chain is unique in that our workflow solution has an in-built feature that can check whether users – individuals or corporates – have already registered for the onboarding process. This security measure helps to prevent sybil attacks.

Are you looking for a market-leading automated KYC tool for onboarding your corporate or individual clients?

Get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss how KYC-Chain can be your partner in the process.