Fulfilling know your customer (KYC) requirements is a costly and time-consuming activity for banks. Despite having thrown masses of people at the problem, the customer onboarding experience remains dismal because of friction in the KYC process. “The dissatisfaction on the customer side is very pronounced, which in turn is felt by the banks,” says Gene Vayngrib, CEO and co-founder of Tradle, a blockchain-based KYC and onboarding platform.
Yet traditional KYC utilities have not managed to gain widespread market acceptance – mainly because they are centralised, he argues. “Centralisation doesn’t work in today’s compliance world,” says Mr Vayngrib. “The beneficial owners or controlling persons of a company do not want to provide their data to yet another third party where it can be hacked or potentially misused from a competitive, privacy and safety point of view.”
