Nordic Banks brace for Digital KYC with centralized Database

Five major Nordic banks have formed a partnership to establish a company that will compile a centralised database for Digital KYC services. In order to ensure greater transparency and identify financial risks that can create regulatory penalties for these banks, KYC was considered to be an ideal candidate by the bank executives. A shared facility will not only provide wider data bank for banks to utilise but it is also targeted to reduce development cost and maintenance charges for each banking organisation.

The Joint venture will be known as Nordic KYC Utility and will solely be focused on development of an “efficient, common, secure and cost effective” platform for sharing confidential and personal information. The vetted data will be provided by customers for opening an account or to perform transactions and funds’ transfer.

Why Digital KYC for Nordic Region?

Nordic KYC Utility will be opening shop to provide KYC services not only to the founding banks but to large and midsize nordic corporates as well. The management of the founding banks plans to offer KYC services to third parties as well, once the entire database is fully functional and operational. KYC is the easiest method to verify the identities of future customers and sort out the bad apples before receiving a regulatory penalty for handling business of customers or enterprises that are deemed as financial risks by financial regulators. Financial watchdogs around the globe want banks and financial institutions to tighten their business practices in order to identify their users. It further helps in gathering information about why these customers are in need of banking or financial services and what kind of niche those businesses/individuals belong to. It helps regulators to find out the needles of financial criminals in the haystack of businesses and banking customers.

A Unified Platform for Digital KYC

The approach adopted by Nordic banks, i.e. a unified database for KYC compliance, is also being seen as an efficient alternative to the otherwise time consuming and multi-format KYC services available at different banks. As the founding members of Nordic KYC Utility are already one of the largest banks of the region, customers will be facilitated to perform KYC and get their credentials verified in a robust and uniform manner.

The formation of company is yet to be verified by the European Commission under the Merger Regulations of the European behemoth. It is expected that operations of the company and foundational activities will be charted out once an approval is received from authorities that is expected by the end of Q2, 2018.

When we talk about Digital KYC services, there is a strong case made by an up and coming SaaS product – Shufti. It is an end to end verification service that is perfect for any banking or financial institution, which is looking to adopt KYC services in any part of the world. Powered by Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, Shufti can verify identity of every person in the world and validate credentials of a person within industry best time of 30-60 seconds. KYC services by Shufti can verify identity documents in any language, belonging to any country of the world. Shufti can also integrate easily with the pre-existing systems through its flawless API and SDK integrations. AML Compliance and Customer Due Diligence are added features of Shufti for banks and financial institutions that want to completely rid their operations from any financial crime risk.