Kyckr, the corporate Know-Your-Customer company and Blacksmith KYC, the RegTech venture of ING Bank, have partnered by giving Blacksmith’s clients access to Kyckr's real-time data retrieval and registry connections - simplifying onboarding and review processes that would otherwise take months. 

Kyckr provides its customers and partners real-time access to aggregated corporate Know Your Customer (KYC) and Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) data from over 300 company registries and primary regulated sources worldwide. This data allows companies to understand their customers and suppliers better, minimising exposure to commercial risk, preventing financial crime like money laundering, and ensuring regulatory compliance. 

Blacksmith, with policy digitalisation as the core of its solution, offers ING Bank and its other clients a single platform to digitalize and automatically apply their policy requirements in the KYC process, collect only the relevant data from the sources they trust, and deliver standardized and actionable customer due diligence (CDD) files. With their DataHub and Digital Policy Manager Blacksmith cuts the efforts to create CDD files in half and enables its clients to stay compliant with changing regulations. 

Nynke Postma, CEO of Blacksmith, said, "Our integration with Kyckr gives our clients access to real-time data from over 300 primary regulated sources. This will help them build trusted relationships with customers faster and more efficiently. On top of this, it enables them to put their KYC teams back within their strength. Rather than manually collecting and processing large amounts of data from a large variety of data sources, they can now focus their efforts on risk analysis. Analysts now start the process with more and higher quality data, and better insights in data and risks which drastically improves the efficiency and quality of their KYC process."

Ian Henderson, CEO of Kyckr, said, "Partnering with Blacksmith means a more integrated solution for businesses that want to verify the provenance of their customers and suppliers - while at the same time streamlining their onboarding process. There’s greater awareness today across all sectors that KYC isn’t just for regulated businesses. It’s essential to risk management and wise data-led decision-making. Our API enables greater integration and automation across the RegTech industry, which is good for legitimate businesses and bad for financial criminals."