”Our goal is to promote global transparency and make regulations less onerous on both suppliers and customers of financial services by providing a highly intuitive, end-to-end compliance solution.

Our Identity

Established in Hong Kong in 2015, Know Your Customer was founded by Claus Christensen, Richard Barrett and Cormac Doddy. The three co-founders, whose combined experience ranged from real estate and property development to IT and business strategy, joined forces to build a state of the art platform and revolutionise the world of KYC compliance. Their mission was to fully digitise and streamline the onboarding process for both corporate and individual customers, improving efficiency and strengthening compliance.

With offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Dublin and team members across 17 different countries, Know Your Customer has quickly established a global presence and a reputation for excellence. Our clients span across 11 sectors – including banking, FinTech, insurance, payments, real estate, asset management, legal, among others – and 18 jurisdictions and are using our technology to verify and onboard customers from more than 180 countries.

Our Vision

Global attention to money laundering and financing of terrorism practices has grown exponentially in recent years. As criminals constantly come up with new tactics, financial regulators frequently update compliance requirements in their fight against dirty money.

From the beginning, our team has constantly focused on developing a cutting-edge, market-leading solution that truly addresses organisations’ compliance needs, yet is flexible enough to adapt to new requirements and industry standards as they are introduced. We are deeply committed to enabling transparency and clean business practices through the power of automation. Our objective is to ensure that our technology stays one step ahead of key trends in customer experience, helping our clients deliver the digital journeys and interactions that their end users now expect from them.

The KYC Leadership Team

Richard Barrett

Co-Founder & Chairman

Richard is the co-founder and chairman of Know Your Customer. Throughout his career, Richard listed companies on the London Stock Exchange, the Singapore Stock Exchange and London’s Alternative Investment Market. With more than fifteen years’ experience operating businesses in China, Richard set up several Investment Fund Management companies, including an RMB Fund in China. Richard is also a Senior Research Fellow of the Asian Competitiveness Institute at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, a constituent part of the National University of Singapore.

Claus Christensen

Co-Founder & CEO

An experienced entrepreneur and executive, Claus has been active in the software industry for more than thirty years.

Prior to co-founding and becoming CEO of Know Your Customer, Claus founded Servolutions GmbH, a company that develops email server infrastructure products for more than 60,000 global customers, and served as Vice President of Electronics at Thielert Aircraft Engines. A native of Germany, Claus studied computer science at the University of Hamburg.

Cormac Doddy

Co-Founder

Cormac Doddy is a co-founder and board director of Know Your Customer. Based in San Francisco, Cormac has spent most of his career working in international capital markets and specialises in commercial real estate.

He is Vice President at Stockbridge Capital Group and was previously with QIC in Los Angeles. Cormac spent 9 years living in China where he worked with Forterra Trust and Cushman & Wakefield. He holds a master’s degree in International Real Estate Markets, a bachelor’s degree in economics and is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

Maria McDermott

Director of Corporate Affairs & Risk Management

Maria is a qualified accountant and qualified company secretary with over twenty-five years’ experience working in the offshore finance industry. She has extensive experience in investment funds, private wealth, compliance and risk management having worked on the set up and administration of various structures including companies, trusts, unit trusts, business trusts and partnerships established in a variety of jurisdictions globally. She has also worked on the listing and ongoing administration of entities listed on stock exchanges in both Europe and Asia.

Maria is Know Your Customer’s appointed Data Protection Officer.

Company Culture

At Know Your Customer we believe in the importance of fostering a company culture driven by the principles of transparency, diversity, equality, innovation and collaboration. This is reflected by the composition of our management team, where members hail from 6 different geographies and 50% are female.

Reflecting the global nature of our management team, our full-time employees are based across 13 countries, guaranteeing round-the-clock support to our global customers.

Rory O'Connor

Head of Finance

After holding various positions at KPMG, Deloitte & Touche and gaining extensive experience in investment funds, project management, corporate restructuring, investment banking, financial reporting, forensic accounting & auditing, Rory joined Know Your Customer to lead the Finance function of the business.

An Irish native, Rory holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance from University College Cork Ireland and is an Associate of the Chartered Accountants Ireland (“ACA”).

Maeve Reilly

Head of Customer Engagement

Maeve has more than 15 years’ experience managing customer service and customer engagement teams across many blue-chip companies, including Citigroup.

Maeve's extensive skill set includes the management of large customer service and engagement teams consistently working towards maximising all commercial opportunities.

Kieron O'Brien

Head of Sales

Kieron has spent over twenty years in the financial markets bringing new entrants to the market and build brand identity and market share.

Prior to joining Know Your Customer, Kieron worked with a leading Irish risk monitoring and regulatory reporting cloud platform. He also worked on market surveillance, data analytics and IR services projects at a leading European Exchange. Kieron is a post-graduate of Long Island University in New York, and CIMA qualified from the College of Commerce in Dublin, Ireland.

Valerie Kennedy

Head of Marketing

With a degree in Business & Legal Studies, and a Masters in Marketing from Smurfit Graduate School of Business, Dublin, Valerie has more than twenty years’ experience developing brands and marketing strategies across a variety of industries and geographies.

Prior to joining Know Your Customer, Valerie has worked in a combination of B2B and consumer-led organisations in the tech and TELCO space, managing brand development and trade marketing strategies with organisations that include British Telecom (BT), O2 and Baltimore Technologies.

Outstanding Customer Experience

At Know Your Customer, we are truly passionate about delivering outstanding customer experiences to both our clients and our clients’ users. This is why we have built a range of extremely sophisticated yet easy-to-use digital solutions that are setting a new standard in the space of regulatory compliance and customer onboarding.

Our objective is to ensure that our technology stays one step ahead of key trends in customer experience, helping our clients deliver the digital journeys and interactions that their end users now expect from them.

We work hard to deliver exceptional customer support and anticipate our clients’ jurisdictional and regulatory needs of tomorrow. Our configurable, country-specific workflows make it easy to follow best practices in compliance with international and local regulations, while our team of customer support experts are always just one click away.

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