KYC3 Helps Knowing Your Customer, Counterparty And Competition


Hosted at the luxfuturelab, bank BGL BNP Paribas’s startup incubator, fintech startup KYC3 aims to bring sweeping change to compliance market. The startup avoids companies spend hours using search engines or background screening companies to review potential clients. In other words, it simplifies the due diligence process and helps companies get interactive reports to take decisions. We asked KYC3 CEO Jed Grant to tell us more about the technology developed in-house, the purpose of the concept and the strategy to grow faster.

What is the purpose of KYC3? Why 3?

KYC3 is a Luxembourg based FinTech company founded in 2014. We provide artificial intelligence driven big data analytics on unstructured data for Knowing Your Customer, Counterparty and Competition – therefore the 3.

[…] we are able to offer excellent value for money and turn compliance costs into competitive advantages.

Built on technology that we have developed since 2012, KYC3 offers software as service solutions to financial and legal professionals that extend and improve risk based approaches to the management of compliance and reputational risks. Through the use of open sources and proprietary technology, we are able to offer excellent value for money and turn compliance costs into competitive advantages.

What do you propose to businesses and individuals?

Through our technology and implementation, we are able to offer the best value for money in KYC and market intelligence solutions.

[…] our AI reads over 30,000 articles of information per hour […]

Our content includes all major watch and sanctions lists, political exposure lists, millions of company filings and news content from more than 55,000 different news sources. Our added value above traditional data aggregators comes through our AI which reads over 30,000 articles of information per hour, so you don’t have to! We make this massive amount of market intelligence available in a unique and innovative interface that facilitates instant discovery and drill down on important facts, so you can get the intelligence you need much faster than you would with a traditional keyword search and result solution.

[…] KYC3 provides an added level of compliance and reputational risk management that is not available anywhere else.

We even offer “instant KYC” reports, so front office and back-office staff can get an instant and auditable proof of checking their prospects and clients in just seconds. For more demanding professionals, we also offer KYC3 Enterprise subscriptions. On top of the Pro offering, enterprise provides detailed indexes that are used to screen for individuals and companies in context in real-time. Integrated into a company’s CRM and existing compliance solutions, KYC3 provides an added level of compliance and reputational risk management that is not available anywhere else.

How do you aggregate the information? How do you keep it up to date?

Our information is primarily open source. We collect sanction and watch list information from the primary sources, i.e. the government and international bodies that publish and maintain such lists.

Our company data is sourced directly from the national company registries and our news content is taken from over 55,000 different web sources of news […]

Our PEP information is taken from official publications and from contextual identification of PEPs made by our AI. Our company data is sourced directly from the national company registries and our news content is taken from over 55,000 different web sources of news, ranging from the major players, like CNN and BBC to obscure and regional news sites from around the globe.

While our news information is sources much like Google does, by web crawling, our other information is often from the so called “deep web” and requires that we programmatically extract it before our AI reads it. Our systems are continually refreshing our sources; we collect 24/7 in near real-time.

What is your strategy? What are the next steps?

We are a start-up that has just moved into full sales mode with several paying clients already closed and using our solution. Our next steps are to move the few beta users left on the platform to paying clients or get them off the platform – they will get a good deal though, so I expect most to stay on.

We are moving swiftly into the market in Luxembourg with a face-to-face sales strategy.

While our longer term plan involves selling internationally through web based growth hacking and professional social networks. We are moving swiftly into the market in Luxembourg with a face-to-face sales strategy. This is for two reasons, first we want to build an international community of users that can provide ready feedback and expose our service to a large number of real-world use cases in order to learn. We also want to form a KYC3 user group later this year to formalize this process. Second, our aim is to self-finance the growth of the company through sales as much as possible. This ensures that we stay lean and focused in our drive to deliver exceptional value to our customers.

What do you think about the Luxembourg Fintech industry?

Luxembourg is a great place for FinTech and it certainly has potential to become a major hub in this space. The government and several private initiatives have certainly raised the profile of the sector recently.

We need the local “place financier” to get on board and readily adopt “made in Luxembourg” solutions, even when that means being an early adopter.

However, I think there remains much to be done. Startups like KYC3 need all the support we can get. Historically, Luxembourg institutions have been late adopters of technology and this needs to change. We need the local “place financier” to get on board and readily adopt “made in Luxembourg” solutions, even when that means being an early adopter. In this regard, BNP Paribas is setting a great example with the LuxFutureLab, which we are happy to be in.

Also, Luxembourg, and European VCs in general, are much more risk averse than their US counterparts. This puts Luxembourg, and Europe, at a disadvantage. The government programs, such as Luxinnovation and the numerous grants and subsidies offered by the Ministries, offset this fact somewhat, but more needs to be done and the risk appetite needs to be dialed up a notch and mentoring and support needs to be increased so that we can get a more active and healthier community of startup companies that are nurtured and grown into the future FinTech leader that Luxembourg aspires to become.

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