Benefit
The Rising Mandate Of KYC
Financial Institutions (FI) today are mandated by the Central Banks and regulators of their countries to verify their customers identity as part of Know Your Customer (KYC) due diligence and ensure that their customer’s personal information and contact details are up to date. Thus, contacting each customer to maintain updating their records is a huge process, time consuming, requires resources and is inconvenient to customers. The same applies whenever applying for a new financial service (onboarding).
With rising banking customers worldwide and risks of emerging frauds and financial risks in the domain, regulators and central bank fraternity have also levied multi-level screening and checks of individuals and corporates with periodic iterations. This has not just increased the overhead cost for the FIs but also made customer experience uncomfortable. Additionally, KYC is mostly done in silos where individual financial institutions invest in manpower, technology and infrastructure to cater to the KYC process.
Idea of eKYC is to create a digital secure network where individual customers or corporate (subject of KYC), banks and financial institutions, regulators or central bank authorities co-exists and hence KYC can be executed on this network seamlessly and effectively. The network or platform should be able to cater all compliance requirements of KYC with improved customer experience, cost optimization for FIs and no risks for regulators and capable of scaling up or down as and when required.
Main objective of this project was to develop a BLOCKCHAIN EKYC PLATFORM to demonstrate viability of using blockchain to enhance the customer onboarding process and periodic due diligence requirements as part of KYC in Bahrain. BENEFIT wanted to embrace blockchain to address the objectives given by the central bank of Bahrain to provide EKYC solution to all financial institutions.
