business management blog posts

A next-generation data exchange platform for KYC and supplier onboarding

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

As the first step of any B2B relationship, onboarding is critical for both compliance and customer knowledge. The two main onboarding processes today are Know Your Customer (KYC) for financial institutions and Know Your Supplier (KYS) for corporates.

KYC establishes a client’s identity and activity through collecting data and supporting documents such as proof of identity, proof of address, certificate of incorporation, etc., to fulfill KYC norms. These norms encompass anti-laundering, anti-tax evasion, and anti-terrorism legislations in place in most countries around the globe.

KYC isn’t a one-time process – it’s a recurring process where financial institutions are required to enforce evolving regulations by collecting and maintaining updated identity records. KYC is also known to be an expensive, time-consuming, and risk-exposed process.

The challenge of KYC

Although KYC is a common pain-point affecting every financial institution, the panacea is far from being a simple industry-shared solution.

Banks are responsible for their KYC compliance and want more than anything to keep private access to their client knowledge.

In addition, KYC is a typical example of Pareto’s law. If 80% of the data and documents collection can be mutualized around a common questionnaire baseline, the other 20% will account for 80% of the total costs.

In short, banks need a common baseline to cover most of their KYC data collection, while simultaneously carrying out bespoke outreach to close their extended due diligence.

A flexible KYC solution

Internally known as “Blue Catalyst”, this trusted data exchange for KYC and KYS onboarding, built around three key attributes:

  • A private digital vault by legal entity that enables any legal entity to organize information on its private vault and to share data and documents privately and securely with any other legal entity
  • A bespoke customer outreach that enables any legal entity to bilaterally request and send information to any another legal entity for onboarding purposes
  • An end-to-end and tamper-proof audit-trail that keeps an immutable track of every transaction that occurred on the platform while remaining GDPR-compliant by design.

The platform leverages a distributed ledger technology (DLT) protocol called Corda, created by R3. By enabling an immutable, secure, transparent, and streamlined audit-trail for parties to carry out transactions, Corda enables us to give banks and corporates trusted onboarding capabilities.

At its simplest, our new onboarding platform means operational efficiency gains, improved trust, and lower costs for financial institutions. For corporates, this translates into faster onboarding and eliminating the need to provide the same information multiple times.

To learn more about how Capgemini is building a next-generation trusted data exchange platform for KYC and supplier onboarding, contact Manuel Sevilla.

Read more  about how blockchain is having far reaching implications across sectors.

Manuel Sevilla advises customers on moving to a new world with radically faster time-to-market, new business models, new ecosystems, and new customer expectations, through adopt domains such as cloud, cloud-native, AI, blockchain, and DevOps.