AML / KYC
Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer programs are the operational face of financial crime compliance — the customer onboarding, identity verification, and ongoing monitoring systems that regulators examine.
AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) are complementary but distinct compliance programs. KYC focuses on customer identity verification at onboarding — confirming who the customer is, verifying their identity against government-issued documents, screening against sanctions lists (OFAC, EU, UN), and assessing their risk profile. AML focuses on ongoing monitoring of customer behavior — detecting transaction patterns consistent with money laundering, terrorist financing, or sanctions evasion after the customer relationship has begun.
The technology infrastructure for KYC has grown significantly more complex. Identity verification at onboarding now routinely involves biometric liveness checks, document authentication against issuer databases, real-time screening against OFAC SDN lists and PEP (Politically Exposed Person) databases, and adverse media screening. The Customer Risk Assessment must be documented and scored — with higher-risk customers (PEPs, correspondent banks, high-cash businesses) receiving enhanced due diligence (EDD) that requires additional verification and more frequent review.
Sanctions compliance is technically the most demanding aspect of AML/KYC. OFAC's SDN list and OFAC country sanctions programs require real-time screening of every transaction — not just customer onboarding. A US financial institution that processes a transaction involving a sanctioned person or entity faces penalties regardless of intent. Sanctions screening systems must handle name matching with transliterations, AKA names, and name variants at transaction speeds — false negatives are a regulatory violation, false positives create operational burden. Tuning this balance is an engineering discipline.
We build AML/KYC infrastructure for fintech companies and financial institutions — integrating with identity verification providers, sanctions screening APIs, and PEP/adverse media databases, implementing Customer Risk Assessment scoring engines, designing Enhanced Due Diligence workflows for high-risk customers, and building the audit trail that supports both internal compliance review and regulatory examination. Our implementations are designed for the examination standards of FinCEN, OCC, NYDFS, and FCA.
Compliance-Native Architecture Guide
Design principles and a structured checklist for building software that is compliant by default — not compliant by retrofit. Covers data architecture, access controls, audit trails, and vendor due diligence.