Loes Bomans unveils the future of KYC

In this blog we meet Loes Bomans. We discover more about her career and views on unveiling the future of Know Your Customer (KYC) with digitization.

Career pathway

Loes embarked on her career in 2014, as a retail banking trainee at ING after completing her MSc in Strategic Management. During her years at ING, she garnered a wealth of experience. Excelling in global roles with a focus on customer digital experience. Notably, Loes led the successful launch of Apple Pay in the Netherlands prior to four years with CoorpID.

Following Encompass’ recent acquisition of CoorpID, Loes joined the team at Encompass as senior product manager. The platforms will enable banks to perform accurate identity and verification of customers by building a complete KYC profile that combines authoritative public information with private information directly from customers to establish a corporate digital identity (CDI). This provides a reuseable view of corporate customers for use across the entire bank when appropriate.

Embracing an Agile approach, Loes emphasizes the importance of creating high-performing teams and values the importance of collaboration and teamwork. She has a focus on the entire journey of product development, from discovery through to delivery and ongoing releases.

Contributions to the Encompass values

Loes balances her product roadmap decisions between long-term vision and short-term results. To reflect the Encompass values her role demands agility and adaptability to navigate the rapidly changing dynamics of the RegTech and banking industries.

The challenges of KYC today

Understanding the market, Loes knows the numerous challenges banks face when it comes to KYC. In particular, banks’ propensity to hire numerous KYC analysts to adhere to regulations, mitigate fines, and safeguard reputation. Furthermore, how many banks have adopted a uniform approach to KYC? Often then generating extensive Customer Due Diligence (CDD) files, sometimes in the region of 600 pages, for their corporate customers, regardless of their risk profile. However, while Loes understands this may be viable in the short term, her view is that it lacks sustainability in the longer term.

The challenges are manifold. The cost of so many analysts is prohibitively high, exacerbated by a shortage of available and willing KYC analysts. Furthermore, complying with increasingly stringent regulations, while effectively addressing the ingenuity of the bad actors, becomes almost impossible within the confines of such an inefficient manual KYC process.

The future of KYC

Loes goes on to explain: The move from a highly manual, time driven process, towards an automated event driven process, requires cultural change. For years banks have been ‘investing’ in KYC by adding KYC analysts to ‘get the job done’ without having the streamlined process and technology in place. Additionally, administration, such as re-work, is completed in a decentralized way. Which leads to a lack of standardization, slow speed, and high analyst turnover.

This needs to be transformed by having the right process in place, with the right technology. The Encompass CDI platform perfectly matches this vision. It can enable banks to focus on the right tasks and let KYC analysts do the job they are hired for: reviewing higher risk client profiles.

The landscape with pKYC

Revolutionizing the landscape of KYC is imperative for banks, necessitating a strategic overhaul, according to Loes. The future revolves around the concept of perpetual KYC (pKYC), introducing a risk-based and event-driven approach. Key to this transformation is the digitization of the KYC process.

The vision requires the automated vetting and review of most customers, allowing KYC analysts to focus their expertise on potentially higher-risk ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) structures. Moving away from periodic reviews, the emphasis shifts to event-triggered assessments, activated by significant changes such as ownership transitions.

In her view, Loes believes that key technological developments, including AI, verified data points, and corporate digital identity, are all poised to revolutionize KYC and make the above happen.

Driving transformation

Technological capability is not the barrier as far as Loes is concerned. The required technology for perpetual KYC is already available. The primary challenge lies in embracing a new operational paradigm and seamlessly integrating into existing workflows and the banks’ IT systems.

However, the regulatory landscape mandates certain documents are obtained directly from customers. To simplify this client outreach, a dedicated platform, can efficiently store and exchange KYC-related documents.

Beyond: Digital Identity and verified data points

With regards to creating corporate digital identities in the KYC process, the technology is available. Banks are already facilitating digital onboarding of retail customers and verifying a person’s identity by means of advanced biometrics such as live facial identification. From a technological point of view, it is not a big step to also apply this thinking to corporate customers, by joining their private information with publicly available data and documents to create digital risk profiles.

A final note from Loes …

“Despite being relatively new to Encompass, I am really impressed by how quickly the acquisition completed. While adjusting to a new organization and different work approaches, we are already operating at an impressive pace. I am looking forward to my journey with Encompass and enabling Banks to establish the corporate digital identities of customers and deliver more effective and efficient KYC.”