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How to choose the best KYB solution for your business: an interview with Tarini Ponniah

How does a Head of Compliance at a leading Fintech company in APAC approach the task of evaluating and choosing the right KYB vendor for their business? To answer this question, we interviewed a compliance expert with over 17 years of experience in the financial services sector, who successfully designed and implemented her company’s KYB compliance and customer onboarding process from the ground up.

Choosing the right RegTech vendor to partner with as a Fintech business can be a daunting task. The number of solutions on the market seems to be constantly growing and most companies often use the same keywords and arguments to convince their potential buyers.

In this context, it is extremely helpful to gain some insights from the experience of fellow compliance leaders and learn how they approached the evaluation process, what functionalities were most important to them, and what determined them to choose a solution over the others.

Tarini Ponniah, a compliance expert with over 17 years of experience in the financial services sector, designed and implemented the KYC compliance and customer onboarding process at a leading Fintech company in APAC. We sat down with Tarini to gain a better understanding of her evaluation process and what were the key reasons why she chose to partner with Know Your Customer.

Question #1

What was the pain point you had to solve when you started looking for a KYB solution?

I was looking to streamline the onboarding process for a vast range of corporate customers.

At the time, it took us between 24 hours and 15 days to collect all the documents we needed to complete onboarding. Quite often, the documents provided directly by our customers were not up-to-date, and validating them against official records was an unsustainably manual and time-consuming process.

My objective was to find a solution that would get me access to a large number of company registries and official documents from one centralised location, without the need to bother the customer with endless requests for documents right at the beginning of the business relationship. My vision was to combine strong compliance controls, by sourcing documents from their official source, with a better onboarding experience, where the customer is only asked for the information that is truly needed, and the rest of the process is controlled fully by the onboarding and compliance team

Question #2

How did you approach the evaluation process of the various KYB solutions on the market?

After identifying exactly what my requirements were, I distilled them into the following checklist:

  • Registry access coverage (i.e. What is the number of jurisdictions available?)
  • Depth of registry access (i.e. What are the types of original documentation provided in each jurisdiction?)
  • Speed of document retrieval (i.e. How quickly are documents provided?)
  • Solution usability (i.e. How intuitive and configurable is the platform?)
  • Auditability of information (i.e. What is the exact source of the company details provided? Are official documents provided, and do they match the information in the system?)
  • Validity of information (i.e. How old/recent is the data provided? Can it be proved that it was sourced in real-time?)
  • Customer relationship (i.e. How quickly can you get hold of an account manager or a customer support representative?)

As I spoke to multiple vendors, it quickly became clear that Know Your Customer was the provider best aligned to my needs. The key areas where the Know Your Customer solution stood out were the extension of their jurisdictional coverage, the types of official and fully auditable documents that were retrieved in each country and the availability and attention we received from the sales and customer support representatives every step of the way.

Tarini Ponniah
Question #3

From your point of view, what were the key results that you were able to achieve by working with Know Your Customer?

The simplest answer is that, by working with Know Your Customer, I was able to quickly bring to life my original vision for a more streamlined and less intrusive onboarding process for our corporate customers.

Our compliance officers are now much more in control of the whole process, as they don’t have to rely on documents being provided by the customer. As a result, the time that it now takes to source documents and identify the shareholding structures of our customers is a very small fraction of what it used to be. And the overall business relationship also gets off to a much better start, as we are not bothering the customer with multiple requests for documents. If all documents are in order, we can proceed to activate their account much faster as well.

About Know Your Customer

Know Your Customer is an award-winning RegTech company specialised in next generation digital onboarding solutions for financial institutions and regulated organisations worldwide.

For teams that are struggling with inefficient corporate onboarding processes, Know Your Customer provides a modular compliance solution that combines the most intuitive digital workspace on the market with unmatched real-time registry data, seamless integrations and smart automation to transform the essence of the compliance function at its core. The products’ modular design enables efficient customisation, as clients can select and implement only the functionalities they really need, all available via Rest API.

Are you ready to digitise and automate corporate onboarding and KYB checks for your organisation?

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Last updated on March 21st, 2024 at 02:07 pm

Maggie Maspero

Margherita Maspero is a marketing expert with ten years of experience in marketing strategy and brand development at international RegTech companies across Europe and Asia. Prior to joining Know Your Customer, Margherita held various positions building brands and driving commercial growth through effective marketing strategies at fast-growing B2B start-ups and scale-ups in London, Dublin and Milan. A graduate of the University of Milan, Margherita holds a Master’s from University College London (UCL).