Know Your Customer (KYC) reaches far beyond ensuring compliance since it can significantly impact business operation’s bottomline with staff easily falling behind in their regular activities to meet new requirements. Add to this, the customer onboarding experience, which tends to suffer when customers become frustrated by slow and inefficient processes—especially when they are asked for the same information more than once.

Here we have the perfect storm: increased customer abandonment and skyrocketing compliance costs. At a time when businesses are under constant pressure to increase margins and improve customer experience, complying with KYC requirements can add significantly to operational costs and penalties for noncompliance are even more onerous.

Regulatory pressures aside, businesses are motivated to ensure they can trust their customers are who they say they are and doing what they say they are doing to protect against fraud, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Establishing Procedures to Reduce Risk

First of all, key to any successful KYC program is establishing the identity of the customer and the customer’s legitimate activities. Collecting and verifying customer identification information to screen against fraud is critical. However, this is often a highly manual process so automating document processing so that the data is immediately and accurately located, extracted and verified can be much more efficient and give the staff the opportunity to keep up with customer onboarding and other essential tasks.

Secondly, additional information needs to be collected for customers who are considered potentially higher risk to ensure all their activities are legal to facilitate due diligence, mitigate risk and remain in compliance. This data collection process can also be automated for accurate results.

Third, initial review of prospective customers against blacklists should be conducted and ongoing  review of transactions can be automated using identity verification techniques including signature verification.

KYC Technology

Parascript technologies turn a manual, error-prone, expensive and slow process into a real-time analysis of submitted documentation. From automated document identification to location, extraction and validation of key data such as name and address, Parascript can help streamline and automate key components of KYC compliance through:

• • Automatic Data Location and Verification. Parascript software can process any type of document from government-issued identification to supporting documentation such as government-issued identification, bills for address verification (including utility bills) and bank statements to ensure customer information is maintained, current and valid. Reliable data improves the efficiency and effectiveness of KYC programs.
  • Signature Verification. Check signatures against those involved in known fraudulent transactions. Parascript provides signature verification with unprecedented accuracy. It enables signature authentication where it is crucial to detect signature fraud. Leverage Parascript for the highest degree of accuracy on any document type that requires signature validation.

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