SAN FRANCISCO, September 30, 2020 (Newswire.com) – Kyckr Limited (ASX:KYK), a regulatory technology company, is pleased to announce it has added China to its network of corporate registry connections, as the need for reliable Know-Your-Customer (KYC) solutions continues to grow at a time of increasingly stringent anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and enforcement.
Over the past year, there has been significant new demand from Kyckr’s customers in the U.S. financial services sector for accurate and legally authoritative Chinese company information. This includes registration information, capital structure and details of Directors and Shareholders, all sourced from the central Chinese commercial registry. Kyckr’s customers can now access comprehensive Chinese company profiles via the Kyckr Registry Portal and API.
A key part of China’s “Made in China 2025” strategy is to invest in state-of-the-art Western firms, thus, Chinese financial interests have acquired more than $120 billion of assets in the U.S. economy since 2002. Fifteen Chinese government entities (sovereign wealth funds and state-owned enterprises) and government-connected private sectors firms account for nearly 60% of this activity.
In April 2020, China also abolished the ownership restrictions for foreign investors in its financial sector, a year earlier than was previously planned. The move is likely to further open up China’s financial system to outside investment.
The U.S. Customer Due Diligence (CDD) rule, which amends Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) regulations, aims to improve financial transparency and prevent criminals from using companies to disguise illicit activities. However, the lack of public information has previously made verifying ultimate beneficial ownership and shareholding in Chinese-owned entities difficult and time-consuming, however, with its new registry-sourced data, Kyckr makes this process simple at a time of increased Chinese company ownership.
Regulators levied $706 million in fines for anti-money laundering violations globally in the first half of 2020 compared to a total of $444 million in such fines for all of 2019. This highlights the importance of having the right RegTech technology to avoid regulatory risk and reputational damage and leave insufficient due diligence on new clients, improper management of AML measures, poor transaction monitoring and a failure to ensure adherence to the rules in the past.
To heighten the stakes, the FinCEN files revealed that banks around the world, including high-profile HSBC and J.P. Morgan, had been involved in US$2 trillion worth of suspicious fraud transfers over the last two decades. The investigations also revealed that US$4.4 billion of suspicious funds were transferred in and out of banks based in Singapore.
Kyckr’s CEO Ian Henderson commented, “The recent investigations into top banks highlight the need for Know-Your-Customer solutions to prevent money laundering. At Kyckr, we are on a mission to increase the amount of data and data sources available to our customers so they can easily establish who their customers are and stop money laundering at its root.
“Adding China to our data registry network comes at a pivotal time. In our conversations with customers, China always comes up as one of the most difficult countries to verify company information in a fast and accurate way. The data we can now provide will go a long way to simplifying the process of onboarding for both Chinese-domiciled and Chinese-owned firms and meets Kyckr’s high standards for currency, accuracy and legal authority.”
The addition of Kyckr’s Portal and API is part of a wider program of product development designed to increase the amount of data and data sources that Kyckr makes available to its customers, at a time of increasingly stringent AML regulations and enforcement.
About Kyckr Limited
Kyckr is a global regulatory technology (RegTech) business that provides the financial services sector and other regulated businesses with real-time company registry information to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Know-Your-Customer (KYC) processes during the critical stage of customer verification and onboarding as well as post-onboarding customer monitoring (Perpetual KYC). Kyckr’s solutions connect customers to over 180 regulated primary sources in over 120 countries. Through its KYC and Company Watch (Perpetual KYC) solutions, Kyckr helps businesses and customers to prevent money laundering, fraud and financial crime.
Know-Your-Customer Technology Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
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