It’s hard to know who to trust. In a world of digital tools and interactions, someone’s online identity isn’t always what it appears to be. Data breaches, phishing schemes, identity theft, money laundering, and other digital scams have wreaked havoc on every sector—from financial services to dating sites to the sharing economy. The abundance of identity information shared and stored online has also created a goldmine for fraudsters, and bad actors are exploiting data privacy breaches to their benefit. Digital identities act as currency on the web, with specific data records being sold for $0.25-$60 in illicit markets. The Intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) estimates that 2009 proceeds generated from illicit activities such as drug trafficking and organized crime amounted to 3.6 per cent of global GDP, US$1.6 trillion of which was laundered to disguise its illegal origins. Additionally, corporate losses from fraudulent online transactions are expected to reach US$25.6 billion in 2022

So what’s not working?

• Costly — Financial services firms spend an average of 10-18% of gross revenue on financial crime compliance;
• Time consuming — The average B2B transaction takes 6-8 weeks for compliance processes to be completed in the back office, with compliance processes varying by jurisdiction;
• Disjointed — Compliance teams use 5-23 different systems that are built to talk to each other to manage a single crossborder deal;
• Ineffective — Most notably, organizations around the globe are able to identify only $0.20 of every $100 laundered through existing compliance programs.

Whether to lessen the likelihood of financial crime, reduce fines for non-compliance, and protect brand reputation, financial services organizations have clear incentives to accurately verify their users’ online identities through effective Know Your Customer (KYC) practices—an integral part of AntiMoney Laundering (AML) regulation. All financial institutions and financial services organizations including banks, insurance companies, accounting firms, and wealth management firms are required by law to implement a type of banking customer onboarding process to stay compliant with increasingly complex AML and KYC regulations. In the past, properly identifying new clients and verifying the legitimacy of their businesses made the onboarding process time-consuming and often frustrating for clients. Multiple back office programs were set up, none of which were fully integrated. It also led to lower conversion rates as those customers “abandoned ship” due to a poor user experience. Using iComplyKYC Digital onboarding financial services organizations, including online banking, can increase their conversion rates and AML compliance. iComply is a regulatory technology company focused on making financial markets more robust, secure, and efficient. Our KYC platform, iComplyKYC, is a unified, fully integrated verification platform offering a range of identity proofing services to accurately establish, maintain and reassert trust from account opening to ongoing transaction monitoring. iComplyKYC provides AI-driven services that verify the identities of new and existing users, assesses their risk and allows them to meet their compliance mandates. Our digital onboarding solutions, means that collecting personal data is simplified, as is identity verification. Digital online onboarding is made possible by machine learning and automation, which minimizes human involvement and enhances accuracy. The client can safely provide comprehensive personal data and have it quickly verified. The process includes various ID authentication methods such as verifying identity data, authenticating identity documents, biometric facial recognition, liveness detection, and other methods that can now be completed entirely online, from anywhere in the world. In a matter of minutes, our clients can verify that their clients are who they say they are. So what really makes iComply different? iComplyKYC offers a modular solution for the whole KYC process from start to finish. Whereas, a lot of existing solutions are single point which means that these systems have to be connected by building custom software or worse, manual processes. iComplyKYC is fully integrated and allows for single or interconnected workflows. This reduces vendors’ need to fully automate a multi-jurisdictional translation to just one solution and allows them to keep costs at a minimum, mitigate financial crime risk and improve back office efficiency. This means that the software allows users to navigate changing regulations, save money and protect against fraud, all while delivering an excellent customer experience to their end customer. The software allows users to configure custom regulatory workflows for every recognised country in the world. The platform can be used as a single module that integrates with their current solution or it can be installed as a fully integrated solution. Easy and efficient setup means that it offers a 90% reduction of current processing times and costs for KYC and AML needs. Automating the entire back office flow, eliminates up to 80% of existing manual processes. Complete all back-office processes for financial crime compliance in under 20 minutes (the difference between siloed vs integrated workflows). The iComply suite of digital solutions is helping organizations reduce the costs to build and operate KYC, AML, data privacy and protection programs by 60-99% The technology improves customer success and enables compliance teams to more effectively manage their global risk and compliance across markets, platforms, and applications. iComply enables financial services providers, corporate services, payment processors, and digital banking platforms to succeed in their quest for business innovation and digital transformation, without cutting corners in managing risk and liability. So what does this mean for the end user? By taking this approach, we are able to improve convenience for bank customers, improving security and reducing risk. This combination means that we can really have decentralized regulation, where customers have ownership and control of their data and this allows financial service firms to identify financial crime. Our goal: to help organizations identify $80 out of every $100 laundered—an increase of nearly 40,000% over current methods. Our vision is to promote interoperability to ensure users have a seamless customer experience and can use their digital identity everywhere—only sharing what they want to, when they want to. With the ever-increasing rate of data breaches and account takeovers, cybersecurity is of the utmost importance in the development of these initiatives and is top of mind for us. Smart, reusable, portable and highly secure digital identities are the future of identity proofing, and iComply is proud to be leading the way.