KYC Pain Relief

Pepper Group Leverages SWIFT’s KYC Registry to Redefine the Customer ID Experience

For Australia-headquartered residential and commercial property credit provider Pepper Group, know your customer (KYC) management had always been a pain point. With a variety of lending businesses in countries throughout Asia and Europe, the company engages around 30 different banking partners globally. Keeping on top of KYC requirements has always proven to be time-consuming.

With banks in different jurisdictions having disparate KYC requirements, Jimmy Zhang, Corporate Banking Manager, Pepper Financial Services Group, says the lack of standardisation – even within the same banking group – can be “extremely challenging”.

The TMI judges know, from their conversations with corporates over the years, that standardisation of KYC procedures among banks would save all stakeholders significant time and effort. When Zhang discovered that SWIFT was opening up its KYC Registry to corporates connected to SWIFT – the solution having previously been available only to banks – he said that he jumped at the chance to be part of the working group. Indeed, by collaborating with peers in this way, he knew he had a perfect opportunity to help steer the registry’s development for corporates.

Going live

The KYC Registry is accessed via SWIFT’s website, meaning little implementation effort is required. However, the bulk of the set-up requires all KYC information to be uploaded to the registry. Although Zhang admits that this is rather laborious, he also knows that effort at this stage will be a notable timesaver in the long run.

As its initial target, it took Pepper Group’s parent company around 10 hours to upload all of the required information. Now, with experience, it takes the team between three to five hours per company.

With the basic set-up of the KYC Registry portal completed, Zhang has assumed the position of Pepper Group’s SWIFT administrator, overseeing a small number of employees with portal access. He confirms that the portal “is very easy to use, since it is intuitive, and each field is clear – it’s obvious what needs to be uploaded”. Maintenance of companies’ uploaded KYC information is relatively light-touch too, with the only documents to update being those with expiration dates, such as directors’ passport copies.

The feedback from the banks that Pepper Group works with has also been positive. Uploaded information to date contains around 90% of what they are looking for, notes Zhang. Some minor local requirements have to be dealt with manually, but this is expected given the lack of standardisation of KYC requirements globally. With at least one of Pepper Group’s global transaction banks reporting zero issues in consuming the firm’s registry data, the first project milestone has been easily passed.

Benefits for all

The KYC Registry presents corporate users with obvious time-savings, but efficiencies are created for all parties, notes Zhang. With every new counterparty being onboarded, previously emailed KYC documentation required considerable effort to gather and, for the receiving bank, yet more time and effort in managing those documents. With everything now on the KYC Registry, and all permissioned counterparties able to access the information directly, the manual burden of KYC has been substantially reduced for all.

Promotion

Despite many attempts at creating local KYC solutions, few have had any real impact, their lack of scalability unable to make sufficient return for their creators. But SWIFT is one of the few - if not the only - centralised organisations that is accepted as a trusted source of banking information – by corporates, banks and governments worldwide.  Zhang comments: “With the KYC Registry, SWIFT has a very high level of recognition and trust – especially among the corporate community”.

And while it is early days for the KYC Registry from a corporate perspective, Zhang believes the proposition of a standardised universal KYC repository continues the broader trend of treasury digitisation. He also feels that banks now have a vital role in promoting the opportunities that the registry unlocks for their corporate clients.

“If banks using the registry were to start incentivising clients to upload their documents via the KYC Registry portal, rather than continuing to email them, I believe we could see a great deal of traction among the corporate treasury community. And as numbers grow, the benefits will too,” he concludes.

Of course, as a committed participant in the development of SWIFT’s KYC Registry, Pepper Group is a role model for all corporate stakeholders in this space. TMI is therefore delighted to support the efforts of all involved, having no hesitation in awarding SWIFT’s KYC Registry the accolade of 2020 Best KYC Solution.