51–60 of 62 posts
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.
I'm curious why a tech-first bank like Revolut is not building something like this internally if it's such an obvious cost-saving measure? I understand why traditional banks might not (no tech culture, old processes, all the usual bla).
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 a…
But KYC is such a different problem space that few KYC companies would venture into KYB (and the other way around).
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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.
i.e. "Security through obscurity" - which isn't a phrase with a good reputation in these parts... I note that if you know your way around the dark web, it's relatively straightforward to find a "financial crimes advocacy" website with suggestions on evading KYC and other compliance hurdles; obviously I won't repeat them here (and I know that probably the majority of would-be bank fraudsters probably aren't into check…
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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…
> Efficacy has vastly improved at these validation steps with the assistance of LLMs. Is that "efficacy" as the (customer-hostile) bank defines it, or is this more holistic interpretation that also factors in false-positives? i.e. can you assert that things are better now for everyone, including the completely innocent people who often get caught-up in Kafkaesque KYC ("KKYC?") loops?
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If we fix business banking onboarding there will be no need for this!
At least where I am (in Sweden) that would require scaling back the amount of paperwork banks feel they need to “KYB”. Opening a bank account today requires about the same amount of paperwork as a loan application 20 years ago. You have to submit a business plan with a SWAT analysis. I kid you not.
I'm curious why a tech-first bank like Revolut is not building something like this internally if it's such an obvious cost-saving measure? I understand why traditional banks might not (no tech culture, old processes, all the usual bla).
Traditional banks are actually a harder sell b/c they are more risk averse in terms of data leaving their servers.
In the case of Revolut, I'm sure they will build something similar in-house, if they haven't already since I left!
I've seen reports of skilled candidates being weeded out and unskilled ones gaming the system with this happening in the ATS space. Legitimate candidates are rejected without ever knowing that they were filtered out and have no way of know why or how to fix it. Aside from saving time for business customers, how do you intend to address this sort of system abuse and failure of users?
(not affiliated to the company) - This is KYB (know your business), not KYC (know your customer) - Pretty sure there is manual oversight/review behind the AI - Fraud detection is an entire domain space with dedicated companies/solutions
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> Efficacy has vastly improved at these validation steps with the assistance of LLMs. Is that "efficacy" as the (customer-hostile) bank defines it, or is this more holistic interpretation that also factors in false-positives? i.e. can you assert that things are better now for everyone, including the completely innocent people who often get caught-up in Kafkaesque KYC ("KKYC?") loops?
Yup exactly that! One of the benefits of what we're building is that fintechs/banks can now approve good customers quicker. So the innocent ones benefit greatly from Arva.
Well, that's half of it.
What about people who get disapproved because they were flagged by some automated screening? ...they end-up getting stuck in limbo because they were flagged, so they can't even (for example) close-out and withdraw any other accounts they have with the same institution - and they can't get any help because of the "we-can't-tell-you-how-to-evade-KYC" rules.
Stuff that happens all the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/08/your-money/bank-account-s...