The RegTech landscape has changed beyond recognition since 2015 – and Know Your Customer Limited has been there from the start. In this recent conversation with RegTech100, our CEO and co-founder, Claus Christensen discusses the challenges facing financial institutions today, our unique approach to corporate KYC, and how agentic AI will reshape compliance workflows.
The RegTech sector largely took shape in the aftermath of the 2008 banking collapse, helping companies manage the stricter regulations that followed. Know Your Customer is one of the few companies from those early days still thriving, now celebrating its 10th anniversary.
The RegTech company was founded in 2015 by Claus Christensen and Richard Barrett who met while working in Hong Kong. Its genesis came from Christensen’s frustration when opening a business banking account for a simple holding company. He explained, “I was absolutely fraught by the inefficiencies. Watching a compliance person manually leafing through my documentation, certificate of incorporation, annual return, and a hand-drawn structure diagram. It was so painful.”
Unfortunately, this was not the first time he had experienced such onboarding inefficiencies. Working together, the co-founders set out to transform business KYC for banks by bringing real-time registry-sourced corporate information directly to onboarding teams. He added, “Banks were being asked to take on the risk of KYC decisions without good underlying authoritative data. They had to rely on paper document trails that are absolutely horrific and unreliable.”
An evolution over time
Over the past decade, the regulatory landscape has changed dramatically. The number of regulations and updates has intensified, with some estimates claiming over 200 regulatory alerts each day. KYC and AML regulations have expanded their scope with stricter parameters. Sanctions lists have also become more complex, with frequent overnight changes.
On top of this, technology capabilities have advanced dramatically, providing compliance teams with enhanced automation and data collection tools. But the biggest change, according to Christensen, is with end user expectations.
Digital banks like N26, Monzo and Starling, also launched their offerings over a decade ago and have helped to shape the expectation of online experiences. While these have mostly shifted the demands of retail customers, it has also impacted the business side. Christensen noted that businesses demand fully online and streamlined services, whether it is for SME loans, corporate account opening, payment merchant onboarding and so on. “We all insist on 100% online, mobile and digital services and anything else is immediately perceived as a barrier and legacy process.”
Other changes include regulators encouraging technology adoption, an increasingly competitive KYC marketplace, growing Agentic AI adoption, and the widespread opening of corporate registries—which first inspired Know Your Customer to launch. “A lot has happened in the last 10 years, but the cool thing is that most changes have the same thrust towards more compliance and use of technology, so we’re happy about it.”
With so much change in the KYC landscape, it would be easy for any company to get lost along the way and overtaken by new competitors. However, Know Your Customer has continued to stay relevant through all these changes. Christensen attributes this to their persistence.
“This is a story of persistence and integrity. We built our platform in a particular way with live connections to the ultimate source of truth. We stuck with that, even though it meant we couldn’t make some outrageous flashy claims like ‘UBOs found in seconds.’ Our system takes multiple minutes to real-time crawl a corporate structure and arrive at the correct UBO; not just any UBO data.
“We believe, ultimately, the GRC market that we are active in primarily needs accuracy and then speed. And I love challenging, and typically winning against, any vendor who tries the other way around.”
Know Your Customer has also kept relevant within the market by continuously investing into the product and fostering close partnerships with clients. This includes asking clients where their business is going and what updates they would like to see. “Ultimately, staying humble is part of a reason why we’re still around and growing.”
A unique proposition
As mentioned, the RegTech sector has become highly competitive over the past decade. In fact, Research And Markets estimates the sector is currently valued at $14.7bn and will grow at a 20.62% CAGR to reach $115.5bn by 2035.
More competition is great for the market, but it means companies need to highlight how they stand out from their competitors. For Christensen, the biggest differentiator is Know Your Customer’s laser focus on the core value proposition of an authoritative real-time registry for documents and data. He noted that many solutions rely on third-party databases or aggregated profiles from various sources. “We believe that for a financial institution making a risk and compliance decision, only a primary source is good enough and so that’s our main differentiator.”
The Know Your Customer platform boasts live connections to 146 jurisdictions, which Christensen added, is the largest number of live connections in the market. The platform’s OCR and AI capabilities also mean clients gain instant access to filing documents and data, as it automatically converts documents into structured, actionable information.
He added, “It’s a narrow focus in the core product, but it solves one of the hardest tasks in corporate onboarding at scale.”
Challenges in the market
Despite the growth of the RegTech sector, many financial institutions still face common challenges with their KYC workflows. This includes a lack of cohesion between teams. Christensen noted medium and large players often have multiple onboarding teams in different countries and using independent systems. This leads to partial data access, duplicated work, inconsistent decision making and slow turnaround times.
Another challenge is the burden of verifying complex, multi-layered and multi-jurisdictional structures. He said, “Ownership structures have changed. Twenty years ago, the corporate landscape was divided in two buckets: simple local firms and multinationals. Today, even small manufacturers often have multi-jurisdictional corporate structures.” Sometimes these structures are not fully understood.
Christensen explained that one of their clients is a regional bank that considered itself low risk with 95% of customers based in their home country. However, when Know Your Customer examined their data, they found 30% of their KYB cases were international, due to second-level and parent companies located outside the country. Without using technology to identify ownership structures, uncovering this information is very time consuming and prone to error.
Know Your Customer empowers clients to pull and process primary source data from around the world. Rather than needing to navigate the nuances of every local registry and corporate setup type, its solution provides all the needed information regardless of where the entity is based.
Another challenge in the market is the idea of balancing speed and compliance, but Christensen doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive. He said, “Speed and compliance are not completely opposite. Slow processes are often a symptom of poor data management.” Its platform can automatically build ownership structures and compile risk profiles, removing the majority of the manual work that normally slows down onboarding. He added, “Faster onboarding is actually a consequence of better compliance, not a trade-off.”
Preparing for the next 10 years
Know Your Customer has no plans of slowing down. It has several growth initiatives in motion as it heads towards its 10 years. The first of these is a continued focus on its product and expanding the registry coverage to provide greater support to financial institutions. This will include new features to tackle other silos, such as loans, annual business KYC refreshes, corporate cards, FX and more.
The team is also looking to expand geographically, with plans to enter any market there is demand. As part of this, an expansion in the UAE could be on the table, as well as greater coverage of Europe and the US. Finally, Know Your Customer is exploring other adjacent sectors where its solutions would provide value. This includes insurance, payments, asset management, commodities trading and more.
These developments will ensure Know Your Customer will be able to support clients as the markets change. Christensen sees new regulatory developments on the horizon, such as the rise of stablecoins and increased capabilities of Agentic AI, as well as a more complex global landscape that requires greater transparency. Reflecting on how these technologies will reshape workflows, he added a forward-looking prediction: “In just two to three years, I believe agentic AI will be responsible for creating more KYB cases on our platform than human compliance staff.” With this change on the horizon, Christensen concluded, “We’re only at the beginning for Know Your Customer Limited.”
