FF News Tattoo Studio: Encompass on Corporate KYC, Digital Identity and Faster Onboarding

At the FF News Tattoo Studio on day four of Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Alex Ford from Encompass gives a clear look at why corporate KYC and digital identity matter to banks and their clients. Ford traces a personal arc that mirrors the company’s growth. Encompass was founded in Australia in 2012; she knew the founders from a previous venture and joined when the business raised its first funding. That role took her from Sydney to Glasgow for Encompass’ UK expansion, and more recently to New York to help establish North America, life milestones and relocations unfolding alongside the company’s scale-up.

Ford is upfront that she didn’t set out to work in KYC and what pulled her in was the energy of building a novel technology business with a clear mission. She frames digital identity in practical terms: once a person or a company can reliably prove who they are, they can access essential financial services, opening accounts, establishing a credit footprint, getting a loan. For a sector built on trust and regulation, that clarity of identity is the unlock.

Ford is careful to define Encompass’s lane, he company focuses on the corporate and institutional side of banking, not retail, which means helping banks onboard businesses and complex entities in a way that satisfies compliance while keeping momentum. According to Ford, corporates value being able to permission the specific data and documents a bank needs and to see where they are in the process. That transparency reduces back-and-forth, gives clients a sense of control, and helps banks move faster without cutting corners, important in a world where KYC/AML obligations are only getting tighter.

As the tattoo artist works on the Encompass logo, deceptively simple, with unforgiving fine lines, Ford shares two stories of the Encompass logo origin. The tongue-in-cheek version involves a marketing manager with diamonds on the brain; the real one is that Encompass wanted a symbol of clarity and strength. A diamond felt right: strong, clear, and robust, qualities the product aims to embody.

Culture at Encompass, says Ford, is founder-led: focused and fun in equal measure. The team operates in a serious, regulated domain but doesn’t take itself too seriously and as a smaller company working a specific niche, it prizes concentration and pace, while keeping things human, making space for laughs and staying grounded even as the stakes rise.