Know Your Customer Checks with Kerberos Compliance

KYC checks are mandatory in many areas. These include, for example, the verification of compliance with international sanctions, caution when concluding transactions with Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) or in the prevention of money laundering.

Through KYC checks, you fulfil a central obligation of the Anti-Money Laundering Act - the identification of your customers before entering a business relationship. For this purpose, identification documents are checked for authenticity, various databases are searched for PeP or sanctions list hits and a risk assessment is carried out on the basis of this data.

In certain cases, you must comply with so-called "enhanced due diligence". In addition to the KYC check, other potential risk factors are checked. These include, for example, customers, suppliers or other business partners of the persons or companies with whom you want to enter into a business relationship. In addition, a more in-depth network search can ensure that the beneficial owners and their networks also do not give cause for concern and could not develop into a financial or reputational risk for you. For this purpose, adversarial media searches are also carried out on the conspicuousness of the actors in the network.

An (E)DD check can also monitor many other risk areas. This depends on your specifications and on the anomalies identified in an assessment.

Know Your Customer checks involve identifying the people you want to do business with. In doing so, it must be ensured that the persons are really who they claim to be. Kerberos checks by default whether your business or contract partners are Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) or their family members or those on sanctions lists. At the same time, it must be checked whether potential business partners come from countries with an increased money laundering risk or whether other risks could arise from entering into a business relationship.

With Kerberos, you can carry out KYC checks paperlessly. We provide you with our KYC app for this purpose. You or your employees are guided through the KYC process with a few questions for each customer identification.

In the KYC app, you not only commission the KYC checks, but also receive the results of each check shortly, including instructions for action that you and your employees can take into account when subsequently concluding contracts with your customers.

Normally, KYC checks are processed automatically and you receive the results including risk assessment and recommendations for action within a very short time via web or mobile phone application. If "false positive" hits occur, the checks are forwarded to our specialists. "False positives" are cases in which several people with the same name and similar identity characteristics can be considered as persons to be identified in a query, who accordingly cannot be assigned by the system without doubt. In these rare cases, there may be a short wait during KYC checks before you are shown the result.

Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBO) are the natural persons who ultimately initiate a transaction or whose property is traded. In the case of companies with more than one owner, for example, persons with more than 25% of the company shares or more than 25% of the voting rights are counted as beneficial owners. Accordingly, there may be several persons in a company who must be specified or identified in the event of an audit.