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

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

#21

Post by weego »

jannes wrote: post #2

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

There's literally no way we would risk this process being done by anyone other than our compliance team/person.

It's a pain in the ass exactly because it's critical at a level of "oops we lost our license to do business", and part of the pain is the unending edge cases that require personal attention that any attempt to automate will immediately have to break out to a real person. So you end up keeping your headcount of the expensive people and layering another expense on top for no value.

AI agents are a screening tool to wees out interactions that would be a cost to the business rather than an opportunity ie in non-specialised situations (for example customer queries where the answer is the first question in the faq).

They are not a solution to highly specific b2b workflows, and especially not when a regulatory body will always be at couple of decades behind technology.

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

#22

Post by OliverWales »

bijection wrote: post #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!

Thanks for playing, this is useful info!

There's a big difference between the nature of fraudulent documents submitted to our customers today, and the ones that one might create knowing that the system is build with LLMs - we've mostly optimised for the former so far.

I'm also glad to see it took a number of attempts - security through obscurity is not something we want to rely on but the real system requires your identity and will offboard you without explanation at the first hint of misbehaviour.

We'll continue to improve our system to be more vigilant and make fewer assumptions.

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

#23

Post by rhimshah »

weego wrote: post #21
jannes wrote: post #2

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

There's literally no way we would risk this process being done by anyone other than our compliance team/person. It's a pain in the ass exactly because it's critical at a level of "oops we lost our license to do business", and part of the pain is the unending edge cases that require personal attention that any attempt to automate will immediately have to break out to a real person. So you end up keeping your headcount…

Thanks for the insights!

It is certainly a tough balance for banks/fintechs -- fear of accountability vs. a clear value add. From our interactions, using AI to automate low/medium risk is welcomed. The solution can perform in a robust way and often is more accurate and better than a human (note we're improving it all the time!).

For those that are more risk averse there is another option: the Agent can just surfaces all the relevant information and then a human has to sign-off on the last onboarding action, hence making their jobs 10 times easier.

It'll be interesting to see how AI adoption unravels in the space but it's certainly showing good signs!

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

#24

Post by Lionga »

OliverWales wrote: post #5
jannes wrote: post #2

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

Our agent implements every step of the procedure that a human compliance analyst would follow, step by step. As a result, every individual check that makes up the overall decision is documented with the reasoning and evidence the agent used. You can also choose to bucket your customers by risk level and require manual review for higher risk customers (e.g. certain business activities like crypto or gambling, complex…

So a long way of saying "Nope" to the actual question?

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

#25

Post by rhimshah »

threeseed wrote: post #19
jannes wrote: 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.

Yes rightly pointed out, the regulators are the ones that crack down/fine/impose restrictions.

I'd say there are varying levels of automation, where even to this day within low/medium risk, ~30% of cases get to manual review, and with some that number can be even higher!

Yes sanctions is one area where the human touch is very important! Definitely a high risk category

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

#26

Post by rhimshah »

threeseed wrote: post #18
OliverWales wrote: post #8

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.

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 sti…

Not quite!

Fintechs often still have humans review docs, websites, perform web due diligence etc. Efficacy has vastly improved at these validation steps with the assistance of LLMs.

Interesting to hear that your previous bank has automated all of low/medium risk already, from what we have seen more traditional banks are far behind fintechs and are more risk averse in using new technologies. Nice to see that's not the case with all traditional banks.

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

#27

Post by Lionga »

threeseed wrote: post #18
OliverWales wrote: post #8

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.

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 sti…

They do use automation, OP is just straight up clueless.

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

#28

Post by rhimshah »

Lionga wrote: post #27
threeseed wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sti…

They do use automation, OP is just straight up clueless.

Depends on the fintech! 99% don't have 100% automation for all low/medium risk.

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

#30

Post by rhimshah »

Lionga wrote: post #24
OliverWales wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our agent implements every step of the procedure that a human compliance analyst would follow, step by step. As a result, every individual check that makes up the overall decision is documented with the reasoning and evidence the agent used. You can also choose to bucket your customers by risk level and require manual review for higher risk customers (e.g. certain business activities like crypto or gambling, complex…

So a long way of saying "Nope" to the actual question?

It would hold up with the regulator as each decision and outcome is stored and has explainability, so it is in fact even more auditable than a human!
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