A Know Your Customer (KYC) program is a set of policies and procedures implemented by financial institutions to verify and understand the identity and background of their customers. The main purpose of a KYC program is to prevent and detect money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, and other illicit activities within the financial system.

Introduction to Kayla:

In traditional KYC, the KYC information and process are reviewed periodically according to a schedule based on the customer's risk categorization. Today, regulators and financial institutions (FI) are eager to adopt the event-driven approach. However, distinguishing signals from noise remains challenging and is often cost-prohibitive due to the manual nature of traditional KYC processes.

Moreover, banks and FIs often have heavy integrations with KYC or contract lifecycle management tools, such as Pega or Fenergo. From the time and cost perspective, the bulk of their overhead is sourcing and reconciling the data according to their approved policies and procedures.

Perpetual KYC (or pKYC) helps banks and FIs monitor their customers for key changes without incurring significant overhead and manual labor. These solutions enable reacting to events as they occur. This way, important changes are investigated promptly rather than waiting for a fixed refresh date. Plus, clients with no changes are not refreshed unnecessarily—just because time has passed.

Kayla, your personified digital pKYC Coordinator, brings the following capabilities to the table: Coordination of periodic event-driven KYC review activities for entities and associated parties Continuous monitoring of corporate and government registries for KYC-triggering events, such as changes in beneficiaries, boards or officers, addresses, and so on Investigations, gathering of data and records from internal systems, Internet, and commercial databases Accumulation of facts from compliance investigations and internal audits to ensure adherence to regulatory policies for customers and transactions