My Role
Discovery, UI design, User interviews, MVP definition, implementation
Timeframe
Q4 2023
KYC, short for Know Your Customer, is a series of checks that a customer has to go through to be onboarded onto a financial service. This process is performed by the Banking Customer Management team, also known as “KYC Ops”.
At the end of 2023, we were preparing to migrate 6273 customers from our old banking service provider to our new, internal one. Each one would need to go through the KYC process to be compliant. As part of a larger initiative to help the KYC team reach their targets of customers onboarded to the banking platform by automating their routine KYC tasks.
The KYC Process consists of the following steps, :
1. Information Collection: The customer goes through signup flow where they submit information about the company
2. Verification: The KYC Ops verifies the company information
3. Screening: The KYC Ops checks anti-money laundering and sanctions lists, among other things, for any risky information about the client
4. Scoring: The KYC Ops assigns a risk score to the potential customer
5. Decision: The KYC Ops make a final decision of whether they accept or reject the potential customer
In order to define which tasks to automate, we compiled the average time of manual effort each step took to complete during each application.
Step 3, the screening of a customer, takes 10 minutes on average for the KYC Ops, which is 18% of the time spent on an entire KYC application. A majority of these screenings yield no hits in the screening software, meaning that the Ops theoretically don’t have to look at them. Therefore, this was the step we decided to focus on automating.
The expected effort on the screening of the customers needing to be migrated: 10min x 6273 customers = 62730 min or 1045.5 hours of manual screening
Collaborating closely with engineers, we integrated the screening software that was used by KYC ops into the internal back office software they used to onboard customers.
Result: More than 50% of KYC screenings require 0 manual effort.
Working within legal and financial compliance regulations proved to be very difficult. It seemed like the requirements were changing often and it was hard to get a decision from higher up the decision making chain. In the end, we did our best to focus on improving the life of our users and to listen to them to ensure that the end solution served their needs while also adhering to compliance requirements.
