KYC Platform

Overview

Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process of a business identifying and verifying the identity of its clients; these procedures are a critical function to assess and monitor customer risk.

Traditionally these procedures are done manually by examining the customer’s documents and history; and requires effort and time. The KYC solution uses state of the web intelligence and AI capabilities to provide more in-depth knowledge of the customer activity quickly and effortlessly to alleviate associated risks, to prevent financial fraud and money laundering.

The platform will help to:

Establish the identity of the customer
Understand the nature of the customer’s activities (the primary goal is to verify that the source of the customer’s funds is legitimate)
Evaluate money laundering risks associated with the customer
Monitoring the customer’s activities
Create a risk score for each customer

Product and Business Goals

Enable companies to improve their KYC processes for corporates and individuals
Ability rapidly collate all information relating to the customer
Effective risk management operation
Accurate and precise/competent/ efficient due diligence process
An intuitive and easy to use platform
Clean visual language

My Responsibilities

Concept
Research
Mockups
Prototyping

Team

1 Product Designer
1 Product Manager

Exploration Strategy and Research Methods

The process was challenging, and I had to be very creative. I didn’t have a chance to use and test such product or observe someone doing it due to it being an innovative prototype and first of its kind.

I had to invent the product, create use cases, screens, and interface from scratch.

Market Research
Competitive Analysis
Use Cases
SWOT Analysis

1. Market Research

Since the subject was new for me – I decided to start from the beginning:

What is KYC
What problems does it solve
When, where and by whom it can be used
What features are important
How should this product look and behave

I handled market research – to understand the situation in the field, how big the market is, what are the trends; who the customers are, identify and define problems and opportunities.

2. Competitive Analysis

The primary benefits of any competitive analysis are a better understanding of what the competitors are doing, what they are offering to customers.

I conducted the competitive analysis, intending to explore the companies in a given industry sector and market niche that is competing with my KYC product. As my product was the first of its kind, it required me to explore existing solutions and assess them against the vision of my product.

I used this analysis to building domain knowledge, to get more information about the content and functionality of the platform.

This educational process assisted in getting to know the industry to build an outstanding KYC tool.

One of the first things, I created during the competitive analysis is a high-level list of content and functionality where the content relates to informational pages while functionality (features) is what users can do while they are at the platform.

3. Featured KYC Use Cases

Customer Approval

Companies which onboard new business customers should conduct proper KYC due diligence to avoid financial risk, reputational harm, legal and compliance issues.

The KYC reports are beneficial for the banks, auditors, potential partners, investors and legal organizations.

Risk Review due diligence

KYC analysis for the new business onboarding, contract updating and relationship termination.

The KYC reports help risk departments focus on fraud detection and other suspicious manipulations. These reports are also valuable when performing risk forensics and remediation.

Compliance Monitoring

KYC advanced platform lessens the time and efforts of compliance reviews, portfolio evaluations and periodic business re-approval.

4. SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis works excellent in the discovery phase and gives you the whole picture and helps to understand the product. It focuses on four essential topics – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

So how do you create look&feel to a product that does not yet exist?

The first objective that helped me focus on the subject was – that the interface should empower the idea of “getting the right information at the right moment.” For example, bringing the most significant elements to the platform landing screen and creating a dashboard.

Some of the dashboard elements:

1. Continuously updating status list enables us to stay updated on risks with on-demand reporting. It helps detect the unusual activity as fast as possible and streamline the decision-making process.

2. Including a real-time interactive world map visual model with highlighted countries and new findings, helps to see the full image of what’s going on in the companies’ portfolio.

3. Adding a chart that represents the ratio of the Known VS Unknown customers in the portfolio and their risk level.

Another objective was to create a visual representation of all the customers’ network of connections.

Since the platform contains many text information and various types of connections, I decided to show the customers’ connections in an infographic manner – very visual and easy to “digest.”

Outcome

The story was about to create the KYC platform that helps to deal with Big Data and show how this data can be performed and managed most efficiently.

I accomplished research and market analysis to design a prototype from scratch the new type of product for the presale needs – This has led to the business market expansion and, consequently, to the growth and strengthening of the company’s capabilities.

The main goal was to create a unique and simple to use solution that brings maximum value to the users. It led me to create a platform that will change the way that users used to see KYC platforms. I aimed to craft a novel approach that would allow a more natural flow of information and insights about the customer’s identity and potential risks. This tool offers a 360 view of the customers’ online “life”, helps to reveal unregistered connections, potential lines of business and countries of operation that could be risky to the company.