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Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

#14
post #3

This is very interesting. It calls to mind some advice I heard someone associated with YC (maybe PG?) offer a while ago: (approximately) the best ideas right now are the ones that will become more useful rather than less as AI gets better. I say that because although it's been about ten years since I worked at a financial institute, this task seems like it must be still barely too complex for AI alone in its present…

Yes, I would definitely put Arva in that category. For now, we limit the amount of decisioning that is made by an LLM and make as much of the business logic as we can concrete in code. It's mostly used to extract information from documents, crawl websites and identify specific fraud signals.

Very cool! Congratulations on the launch, and best of luck to you!

Re: Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I would definitely put Arva in that category. For now, we limit the amount of decisioning that is made by an LLM and make as much of the business logic as we can concrete in code. It's mostly used to extract information from documents, crawl websites and identify specific fraud signals.

Very cool! Congratulations on the launch, and best of luck to you!

Thanks!

Re: Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

#17
post #16

Does this plug in to any KYB providers to handle exceptions? We have AiPrise already embedded but it'd be nice to have an agent do a first pass to review exceptions that get flagged for manual review.

Yup! Arva can be integrated into current compliance stacks!

Re: Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

#18
post #3

This is very interesting. It calls to mind some advice I heard someone associated with YC (maybe PG?) offer a while ago: (approximately) the best ideas right now are the ones that will become more useful rather than less as AI gets better. I say that because although it's been about ten years since I worked at a financial institute, this task seems like it must be still barely too complex for AI alone in its present…

Yes, I would definitely put Arva in that category. For now, we limit the amount of decisioning that is made by an LLM and make as much of the business logic as we can concrete in code. It's mostly used to extract information from documents, crawl websites and identify specific fraud signals.

So what you're saying is that you could've done this startup a decade ago without LLMs using traditional NLP and ML techniques. Or even just with straight up procedural code, OCR and a rules engine. Especially since as you say everything you're dealing with is highly structured.

I work at a bank and everything you mentioned was solved many, many years ago. So the more interesting question then is why are fintechs still using manual techniques despite having the capability to automate it.

Re: Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

#19
post #2

Would this hold up in court as actually "knowing" your customer if you let an AI handle it?

Courts aren't the issue. It's regulators.

And at least at banks >99.9% of KYC/AML interactions have been automated for many decades now.

The rest are things you wouldn't want an LLM anywhere near e.g. sanctions evasion for which require significant expertise and lots of care.

Re: Launch HN: Arva AI (YC S24) – AI agents for instant global KYB onboarding

#20
I'm not super familiar with KYB, so it could be that this would pass a human check as well, but I got in with a couple of mostly-blank utility bill / AOI templates and a pastebin saying 'this is the company x website, we do business y' as the official company website.

In any case this is a cool demo, and the type of thing that I expect to be mostly solved as LLMs get better. Good luck!

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