EXCLUSIVE: Pioneering CEO turns to LinkedIn to find the ideal international KYB partner

Running a competition to find a new business partner is not unheard of but it’s not often you come across such opportunities on LinkedIn.

That’s the route that Ivan Zhiznevsky, CEO of 3S Money, took recently when he put out a LinkedIn post inviting KYC and compliance companies to prove they could deliver.

Fast forward a few months and a strategic partnership has been formed between cross-border payments specialists 3S Money, and Know Your Customer, a Hong Kong based RegTech provider who will help them to digitise and streamline KYB procedures and bolster 3S’s customer-focused offering.

The idea to go to the LinkedIn community “came out of frustration,” Zhiznevsky told FF News. “Onboarding time in FinTech is one of the key elements to growth… Especially when it comes to SMEs because it takes so long to get them on board with financial products.”

3S Money, who have announced other strategic partnerships this year, allow clients to open a global business account that provides them with localised account details and IBANs, meaning they can transact in those territories as if they were local. They facilitate transactions across 190+ countries and have been championed for their international reach and agility. Of course, for all of this, swift and compliant onboarding of international clients is needed to meet the increasing need for quick and seamless delivery of products and services. He would typically get regular pitches from providers claiming they could offer this, only to find they couldn’t live up to their promises, beyond the UK.

After receiving another such message he thought “why don’t I just ask the crowd on LinkedIn if there’s anyone who can produce those results in real time? They will get good publicity and I can finally find someone who can help.”

First prize to Know Your Customer

The challenge to providers was to see what documents and official information they could retrieve for registered legal entities in specific countries.

He asked for reports on real businesses in the Netherlands, Cyprus, Denmark and UAE. Cracking the last one was more of a bonus, due to the near impossibility of achieving the objective in this territory. Within a couple of hours of making the post, he had 10 responses from providers and in total about 6 companies ultimately came back with reports. However, Know Your Customer stood out from the rest.

“Their turnaround was under one hour. They produced fantastic results, and we loved the reports.”

Whilst many of the responses were incomplete or unable to provide relevant data for the requested regions, Know Your Customer provided “unmatched quality and coverage of official registry data and documents through their platform”, according to Zhiznevsky.

Know Your Customer have built a SaaS platform and API that simplifies and automates corporate onboarding and KYB compliance for financial institutions around the world. Its major strengths come from real time connectivity to company registries across 129 countries, as well as AI driven shareholding data extraction and UBO mapping from official documents. They found out about the competition after Global Head of Sales Jamie Anderson was looped into the LinkedIn post from someone in his network. We were able to speak to Jamie who said, “Zhiznevsky then proceeded to share the challenge to which I obliged and provided the requested information.”

He pointed out the strengths of their platform which allows them to get “the most up to date information businesses and their directors and shareholders from local registries in real-time and even unwrap complex cross-border structures.”

They’re part of changing the industry standard for onboarding and KYC with Anderson pointing out that “most banks have teams of people doing this manually with average onboarding times for a business of around 26 days. With our solution we reduce that to just 1 day.”

Real Time Results

It’s these kinds of results that 3S were looking for and it’s safe to say they’re happy with the results.

After ‘winning’ the competition, “We started the pilot with them,” Zhiznevsky said. “Now all our offices work with them, and all the customers that are getting onboarded with us are getting screened with them. It works fantastically well. We’re already seeing good results and the reduction of onboarding times by 25%”

In response to the partnership announcement, Know Your Customer CEO Claus Christensen said, “We are extremely proud to be the partner of choice for this project, helping [3S] shift the burden of providing official company documents away from the end customer. By integrating our single API, 3S Money is able to source official company documents and standardised corporate and UBO data from their golden source, i.e. the local company registry.”

It’s also an example of online networking delivering the goods. As for why he decided to go down this route Zhiznevsky, who comes from a P2P crowd lending background, said, “I believe in the power of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. I think the community can help a lot if you ask them the right question and if you choose the right format, and the format of was right for this one. I’m very satisfied with the result.”

And he’s already planning to try it again.

“The next question I want to pose is about artificial intelligence. Specifically, around use cases of AI in corporate banking in FinTech. Is there a viable use case that can reduce transaction monitoring time for example, processing of transactions or any other data analysis? So that’s the next post that I’m going to do.”