SentiLink Unveils ‘First-of-Its-Kind’ KYC Product

The identity verification company SentiLink says it is expanding its services to offer a know your customer (KYC) product.

The San Francisco company said in a news release on Thursday (Oct. 21) that this product – called KYC Insights – will complement its synthetic fraud and ID theft scores, “which are already used by most top U.S. financial institutions.”

SentiLink says the “first-of-its-kind” KYC product allows financial institutions (FIs) to assess the identity of a customer opening an account, and can also “dramatically lower the cost of compliance and improve the digital account experience for customers.”

According to the company, while competing products neither stop fraud nor meet customer identification program (CIP) requirements, this product helps FIs achieve three crucial goals: to stop more ID fraud and approve more users, unlock insights about risks posed by applications for further investigation, and fulfill CIP regulations.

Read more: SentiLink Raises $70M to Bolster ID Verification

“The entire team at SentiLink is excited to announce the launch of our KYC Insights product,” said Naftali Harris, co-founder and CEO of SentiLink. “Legacy ‘check the box’ compliance products essentially check for a name/DOB/SSN/address ‘match’ in header data, and claim that they fulfill regulatory obligations.”

The company says KYC Insights not only helps meet CIP regulations and red flag rules, but also helps deal with key risks connected to onboarding new customers. The product can identify high-risk applications, flag email addresses created just days earlier or note that the phone number is associated with more than one identity. The tool can also identify low-risk applicants, but indicate that the data entered is likely a typographical error, the release stated.

As PYMNTS has previously reported, studies show that 47% of companies have experienced fraud at least once in the last two years. The cost of identity theft and fraud continues to grow at a fever pitch, with at least $42 billion stolen in the last two years.