Let start with a brief introduction, what can you tell us about Kyckr Plc and your RegTech offering?
Kyckr is a B2B information services company that aggregates, organises and structures the world’s primary source company data to help businesses reduce the risks associated with counterparty relationships.Unlike traditional data companies which source information from multiple, secondary sources, Kyckr provides accurate information with trusted, legally-authoritative provenance. This helps organisations to avoid the significant regulatory and commercial costs associated with using poor quality information. Through the combination of accurate information with innovative technology, Kyckr’s solutions help businesses to succeed in the fight against fraud, money laundering and financial crime.
What are some of the biggest challenges your solutions solve for your clients?
Our solutions enable our clients to comply with their ever-increasing regulatory AML/CTF obligations around Corporate customers – both onboarding new customers and monitoring existing customers. Our clients need to demonstrate that they truly know their corporate customers – the nature of the business, the directors/shareholders and, where required, the ultimate beneficial owners. This is frequently a manual task, taking many hours of compliance analyst’s time and frequent engagement with the customer making it expensive and frequently a source of customer friction. Kyckr’s solutions can both save time/cost through the provision of up to date information and significantly reduce customer friction on the onboarding journey.
Could you give us a use case of why a client came to you and how they are using your solution to solve their particular challenge?
Our standard use case is a financial services firm, typically a bank or a payments company, looking to onboard a new corporate customer. The Kyckr service supports the onboarding process by independently verifying that the business exists on the local company register and lists the directors, shareholders and (where available) the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) so that they can be “KYC’d”. Once the company has been onboarded, through Company Watch, we can provide an ongoing monitoring service, providing alerts to our clients when key KYC data held at the Company Register has changed. This enables their financial crimes team to appropriately update their customer records and provide the organisation with the peace of mind that their customer database is current from an AML/CTF perspective.
How would you describe the differences between your offering from others in your RegTech category?
Unlike many data providers, Kyckr does not store and provide outdated company data. Kyckr connects its clients directly to the appropriate corporate registry at every search, ensuring the quality and accuracy of the information returned.
What advice would you give to decision makers when choosing a RegTech solution such as the ones your offer?
Key questions to consider include: How well established is the solution? Does it have recognised established clients and for how long? Has it lost clients and, if so, why? How well known is the solution? What are the main competitive offerings? What have been its experiences deploying the solution in liked-sized clients? How robust is the underlying tech? Does it meet common Enterprise security standards? Can it be easily integrated into case/workflow management and/or CLM platforms? What is the cost-value add equation?
Due to the global pandemic a lot has changed in the world in the last year. How has your company changed in the in the last 12 months?
The most obvious change has been to working practices and client/prospect engagement – Working from Home and the rise of video calls. How many times have we heard the term – “you’re on mute”?! We adapted very quickly to the initial lockdown and in many respects this has become a new normal, which is likely to remain in some form. When restrictions relax we will return to the office, but almost certainly not to the old Monday-Friday model. A more flexible approach will be adopted to ensure we are able to respond to our clients/prospects’ needs and maximise the internal benefits of collaborative face to face working and the time efficiencies associated with home working.
Can you tell us about some of your most recent achievements or milestones you’ve reached?
Kyckr’s original use case was the real-time provision of digital data and documents direct from corporate registries globally to support business customer onboarding. Kyckr was simply a data provider. We have now transitioned the business into a value-adding information services company, a SaaS styled business. We have created a Perpetual KYC capability in the form of Company Watch, which enables our clients to monitor their customer bases for changes at the corporate registry that will require an update to KYC records. The primary current client pain-point in the world of AML/KYC compliance is Ultimate Beneficial Owner identification/verification. We are completing the development of a solution to this challenge – UBO Verify – which will be launched over the next couple of months. We have demonstrated our MVP to a number of clients/prospects and have received a very favourable response.
What is drives you as company & what is Kyckr Plc long term vision?
Our vision is a world where all organisations can have confidence in their counterparties through immediate access to accurate, up to date, primary-source information. This is built on over a decade of effort to create the largest corporate registry network – almost 200 registries. While there has been an obligation on financial organisations to access this information for some time, organisations outside of financial services are increasingly recognising the value to their organisations from this information. Over time Kyckr’s information will not just support KYC/AML but also extend to “Know Your Supplier” and global supply chain and logistics requirements.
What are some of the important developments you are seeing in the RegTech industry?
The number of participants continues to grow rapidly– partly fuelled by technological advances and the Covid-induced acceleration of digital transformation in the global financial services sector. For the right proposition there is almost limitless access to investment funds. RegTech alongside FinTech is seen as an attractive investment opportunity. In time the proliferation of RegTech solutions could lead to integration/consolidation opportunities.
What’s next for Kyckr Plc?
Top priority is completing the journey to an ARR-driven Information Services Company. Most of the building blocks are now in place. Kyckr is increasingly recognised as The Registry Expert. Strategic thought leadership contributions will continue to reinforce this. The cloud native tech platform has been strengthened, the Company Watch and UBO Verify services are being rolled out and we are extending our use cases beyond our traditional financial services markets.
Why should organisations use Kyckr for live company registry data instead of building direct registry connections themselves?
Building direct connections with corporate registries takes significant resources and time, plus an advanced understanding of the corporate registry landscape and challenges that exist in different jurisdictions. We should know: it’s taken Kyckr the best part of 10 years (and a whole lot of effort) to get the point we are at now; with a network of over 180 registries which we’re able to source normalised, real time data from.
We frequently speak to banking customers who have begun projects to build their own network of registries, only to abandon them when their tech team have spent 2-3 months drowning in analysis of the various digital connections and are still not providing value to their KYC efforts. That’s before you even get to the many registries that are not easily accessible (or are in a different language), and require skilled operators who can extract the required information at speed.
By using our service, clients benefit from the support of an entire tech function solely dedicated to enhancing and maintaining the world’s leading network of corporate registries, plus our team of registry experts who spend their day fulfilling customer requests manually, where the registry requires it. We keep to strict service level agreements and are proud of the fact that we can return information from many hard-to-reach registries faster than anyone else – all without our customers’ users having to login to multiple sites, complete complex authentication procedures and learn several new languages whilst they are at it!
What’s the best way for potential clients or investors to get in touch with you?
The best first port of call is the website – www.kyckr.com – where you will find a rich range of resources and the opportunity to Request a Demo.