Equiniti Group specialises in payment technology. In 2020 they launched a new know-your-customer (KYC) digital product into the market. This service further opens up opportunities for companies offering invoice finance. The tech is scalable and can be personalised to the needs of an individual company.
The tech can deal with onboarding new customers so that their identity is established for legal purposes. This is essential for many types of digital companies that offer online trading and investing. The law is clear on fraud and money laundering: it has to be stopped by more thorough scrutiny of money transactions.
A company has to show it has made a reasonable effort to establish the identity, profession and legal place of residence of any customer wanting to buy shares, foreign currency or cryptocurrency, wanting to buy initial share offerings, wanting to invest, wanting to join DeFi lending programs and venture capital programs, and other such activities. A bank cannot give an account to a new customer until it has established evidentially and conclusively that the person applying for a bank account is who they say they are. The same is true in the digital realm, and Equiniti’s Enhanced KYC Service provides the same robust measures to bring digital KYC in line with other non-digital KYC systems.
The service is not only scalable – meaning it can handle a large number of KYC requests at the same time – but it can also be personalised to allow a company to focus on the information it requires and the user-experience that it hopes to create.
Equiniti believe their service will be of particular use to factoring companies and asset-based lending (ABL) providers. These types of company rely on large funding pools to deliver invoice finance and ABL. To stay compliant with the law they must perform vigorous KYC checks to stop illegal money being laundered through such types of schemes.
“We are delighted to provide a service that is of invaluable use to lenders in the invoice finance and asset-based lending facilities.”
Chris Adams, head of product at Equiniti Group Digital
Equiniti’s KYC service is part of the larger fintech drive to empower the digital economy and to democratise the funding sector to allow individuals, small corporates and other entities to join a sector previously dominated by banks, pension funds and other large lending institutions.
