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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

#31

Post by aimazon »

If Revolut is handling tens of thousands of manual business reviews per day, and only 40% of applications require review, that's upwards of 10 million new businesses joining Revolut per year. Revolut does not yet have one million business customers, let alone 10 million. Are you conflating KYC with KYB?

Verifying articles of incorporation is a poor example. Verifying business incorporation is very straightforward, it does not require AI, a simple rules-based system will capture most cases because there is a single authority in every jurisdiction. Revolut's business onboarding process has direct integration with Companies House in the UK. AiPrise offers that as a product.

I do not understand where AI fits into a world driven by rules and authoritative information. The success of existing platforms demonstrates this. I hope that I am wrong and that you succeed.

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

#32

Post by rhimshah »

aimazon wrote: post #31

If Revolut is handling tens of thousands of manual business reviews per day, and only 40% of applications require review, that's upwards of 10 million new businesses joining Revolut per year. Revolut does not yet have one million business customers, let alone 10 million. Are you conflating KYC with KYB? Verifying articles of incorporation is a poor example. Verifying business incorporation is very straightforward, it…

Thanks for the comment!

Each review doesn't count as a single business entity, there are several checks within a business case which each require manual review. Plus often there is a lot of back and forth with customers, which is a multiplier.

UK is a poor example as yes indeed companies house is a central registry. In the UK the manual review is generally proving operating address and operations in general.

A good example for incorporation is Delaware in the US which has no information on the status of a company, so it could in-fact be inactive/dissolved. In this situation an additional proof of operations or good standing certificate is needed to verify the entity is active. In other jurisdictions the registry data is not even present so a certificate is needed. In most US states registries take a while to update so a brand new business would need a certificate.

AI is needed to evaluate proof documents, websites, web presence, social profiles. The list goes on.

I wish it were as easy as just using data + rules! If it were, you wouldn't have fintechs with teams of 10s or even 100s of compliance analysts doing this stuff!

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

#33

Post by vouaobrasil »

> a human analyst has to conduct extensive manual verification a lot of the time. This causes long onboarding times, and there are huge costs in maintaining compliance teams and in fixing mistakes—because human analysts often deviate from procedure.

What about the ones that don't deviate from procedure. What happens to the human analysts who do a good job? Are they automated away? AI has so many applications, it seems like the automation is becoming a game, where people are on the race to automate to save only to hope that they aren't automated away themselves.

I'm all for saving time -- heck, I'm a programmer myself and have automated a lot of random stuff. But I wonder if these AI applications are going beyond the optimal amount of automation and pushing too many people out of an opportunity to contribute to society.

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

#34

Post by financetechbro »

What’s your go-to-market? Who’s your end customer? (Buyer and/or user)

Also, what is your differentiator? What makes it difficult for existing KYC / customer verification / etc to compete in the space? In my mind, if you’ve got a kyc business that is proving AI verification solutions, they could just retrain their models on other documents to satisfy KYB, don’t mean to say it would be easy, but definitely feasible. Edit: typo

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

#35

Post by OliverWales »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #33

> a human analyst has to conduct extensive manual verification a lot of the time. This causes long onboarding times, and there are huge costs in maintaining compliance teams and in fixing mistakes—because human analysts often deviate from procedure. What about the ones that don't deviate from procedure. What happens to the human analysts who do a good job? Are they automated away? AI has so many applications, it seem…

The compliance analysts that we have spoken too feel stretched too thin with a huge backlog of cases. We free them up from having to do menial document verification for low risk companies so they can spend more time on the more interesting high risk work.

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

#36

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

OliverWales wrote: post #22
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 id…

Without explanation sounds like when platforms auto ban you without giving a reason or send you endless unsolvable captchas.

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

#37

Post by OliverWales »

financetechbro wrote: post #34

What’s your go-to-market? Who’s your end customer? (Buyer and/or user) Also, what is your differentiator? What makes it difficult for existing KYC / customer verification / etc to compete in the space? In my mind, if you’ve got a kyc business that is proving AI verification solutions, they could just retrain their models on other documents to satisfy KYB, don’t mean to say it would be easy, but definitely feasible. E…

We're predominately selling to US neobanks and fintechs, right now focussing on the smaller ones that are less tied into their existing solution.

KYB is vastly more complex than KYC because there are more things that need to be checked, and for each one a large range of acceptable proof documents. There are also many more edge cases e.g. change of business name or structure, foreign beneficial owners etc. that make an end-to-end solution tricky.

There are other players in this space but they tend to be tools to assist human analysts. We want to fully automate the low risk cases so that they never require human intervention.

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

#38

Post by OliverWales »

HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #36
OliverWales wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 id…

Without explanation sounds like when platforms auto ban you without giving a reason or send you endless unsolvable captchas.

It is not possible to give the reason for offboarding as it may tip off fraudsters on how they can evade detection next time. This is standard across the industry.

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

#39

Post by vouaobrasil »

OliverWales wrote: post #35
vouaobrasil wrote: post #33

> a human analyst has to conduct extensive manual verification a lot of the time. This causes long onboarding times, and there are huge costs in maintaining compliance teams and in fixing mistakes—because human analysts often deviate from procedure. What about the ones that don't deviate from procedure. What happens to the human analysts who do a good job? Are they automated away? AI has so many applications, it seem…

The compliance analysts that we have spoken too feel stretched too thin with a huge backlog of cases. We free them up from having to do menial document verification for low risk companies so they can spend more time on the more interesting high risk work.

That is just the first step -- we both know the next step is replacing them entirely, and you would if you could.
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