Understanding the basics
KYB
Know your business is the verification and identification of a business’s operation, underlying risks of the business. As opposed to knowing your customers (KYC), which focuses on understanding the customers, KYB is for businesses. KYB digs deep into business ownership, business identity, regulatory compliance, and financial details. This process is a very vital one for all businesses, as it determines their existence and trust value in the market.
KYB’s importance can never be over emphasised, as its importance is largely felt in the finance sector of the business as it serves as a tool to prevent money laundering and fraud. Financial institutions are mandated to conduct thorough checks on their clients by regulatory compliance agencies like anti-money laundering agencies so as to ensure they are not involved in any illicit activities.
KYB has also impacted healthcare providers, as it has helped them to be in good collaboration with their suppliers, manufacturers, and logistic companies, ensuring that they are all compliant with regulatory rules for protecting patient safety, patient data, and confidentiality.
KYB has also helped promote transparency in retail business, as there is trust between retail businesses through supply relationships.
Retailers can rest assured that their products are sourced from a legitimate source that follows compliance regulations, quality standards, and environmental protection rules. This has protected a lot of retail businesses brand reputation and brand name for authenticity in the market and won consumers trust.
KYB has helped numerous organisations reduce risks, from financial risk to reputational risk, compliance risk, operational risk, and regulatory risk. Thorough and authenticated KYB always protects businesses from the risk of bankruptcy and lawsuits. This helps protect their reputation, customer trust, and market share.
The effect of KYB can’t be overlooked, as it also helps in the customer’s experience, customer trust, and customer loyalty to the brand.
Now let’s talk about AI and machine learning.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the mother of machine learning (ML). Machine learning is like a fraction cut out of artificial intelligence (AI), as all machine learning is a cut fraction of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is a broad path of computer science that is designed to canary out tasks and functions like humans to cushion the workload of humans and make life easier for humans, while machine learning uses data and mathematical equations to predict, analyse, and carry out tasks. The fractions of artificial intelligence are from deep learning, machine learning, neural networks, reinforcement learning, robotics, computer vision, natural language processing, expert systems, knowledge representation, and reasoning. Machile learning fractions are supervised learning, unsupervised learning, semi supervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and transfer learning.
AI and machine learning are fractions that can’t be separated and have been in existence for decades, before the virality of OpenAI ChatGPT in late 2022 and 2023. AI and machine learning are now part of our regular lives, and that is why we need to infuse them into our businesses too.
AI and machine learning have now been adopted in healthcare for precision medicine, which aims to detect diseases early and find treatment early. AI and machine learning have also made it possible to enhance creativity, as the adoption of generative AIs has made people more creative. AI and machine learning have also helped make informed decisions through the analysis of big data and the prediction of event outcomes in the future, which has helped businesses stay ahead of the event outcome.
AI and ML improving KYB
AI and machine learning have really affected our lives in general, but how can this wonderful innovation be infused into KYB, and how impactful has it been?
AI and machine learning have helped in the Know Your Business process by streamlining processes and automating repetitive tasks.
Let’s dive deeper and see the infusion of AI and machine learning in KYB and how much change it has brought into the process. AI and machine learning have brought about authenticity of process, less time of process, less labour power, and more efficient output.
Enhanced Compliance: with the use of AI and machine learning in the corporate verification process, regulatory compliance has been strengthened, as have the essential safeguards against both regional and international penalties. Politically exposed individuals (PEPs), enforcement databases, global sanctions, and other regulatory lists will all be thoroughly and consistently checked by the AI. Updates and essential checks are provided. Electronic papers are simple to audit and may be updated instantly. Lawsuits pertaining to regulatory compliance may result from manual verification’s propensity for omission and outdating.
Process Automation: By automating every step of the business verification process with AI and machine learning, the laborious activity is completed quickly and without incident. This also guarantees a low labour force because fewer workers will be required to complete jobs that may be completed in a matter of minutes by an automated process that requires little to no human supervision. It may involve integrating real-time verification APIs or sending out reminders for when the next verification check is needed.
Scalability is made possible by AI automation. In comparison to automated procedures, manual processes are slower, less effective, laborious, and prone to errors, unlike AI and Machine learning infused processes. Additionally, they become unsuitable as a firm grows by adding more customers and partners. Large data quantities may be handled by automated procedures with ease, which makes them ideal for a business that is expanding quickly.
Automated Workflows: By infusing AI and machine learning to update platforms to assist in carrying out routine actions included in verification checks. The use of AI in business verification helps automate the workflow. Automated business processes allow for digital verifications where data collection is automated and validated against a huge database of registered firms, eliminating the need for several trips to trustworthy sources to verify papers, waiting days for a response, or having to travel to places. To guarantee compliance, this may also entail doing automated searches on punishment lists or legal databases.
These procedures include, for instance, automated data collection, in which the AI system obtains company information from dependable sources, such as government databases, cross-verifies it, and automatically updates the database with information like tax IDs and licence numbers.
This process significantly reduces the time and cost per verification. It also allows a more linear workflow with fewer steps, reducing the complexity of the process and labour force.
Enhanced Accuracy: A major advantage of AI and machine learning in business verification is the sharp rise in accuracy and decrease in human error. The process of verification entails meticulous cross-checking of specifics, figures, and different values; if this is not done with care, it can result in a lot of inaccuracies. The likelihood of errors cannot be overstated, given the complexity of legal terminology and the large number of data points that need to be verified; errors in human processing are not uncommon. On the other hand, automated systems carry out the tests in accordance with preset rules and are capable of precisely analysing and verifying data.
Making informed decisions: Based on the verification process’s output by the AI, business verification process automation can be built to produce alerts or flags. This enables decision-makers to make decisions more quickly and accurately by giving them clear, timely information on the status of the verification. After reviewing the report from the automated business verification system, keeping an eye out for noteworthy information about the company to be onboarded, and avoiding legal action or fines related to regulatory compliance, business stakeholders make well-informed decisions about business collaboration and partnerships.
Conclusion
In this modern era of AI, business identity verification shouldn’t be a laborious, error-prone, and time-consuming procedure. By automating this procedure with AI and machine learning, organisations will have a quicker, safer, and more affordable way to continue their due diligence while also significantly improving the speed, accuracy, and scalability of the verification processes.
