KYC rebuilt: four vendors to one

The client runs a regulated crypto account for retail customers, with cards, trading and payments across several regions. Its identity checks ran through several KYC vendors, each added over the years to cover one region or one document type.

Each vendor failed in its own way. Users dropped out in the gaps between them, and the cost of a verification was the sum of separate contracts. Nobody could say which vendor lost which customer. Compliance wanted one flow it could audit, and the business wanted more users to get through it.

We redesigned the KYC engine around a single provider that kept the regional coverage the others had given and added Travel Rule checks and transaction monitoring on the same contract. The hard part was moving the live verification flow across without a gap in coverage, so the cut-over ran region by region over four months; after that every verification ran through the one provider.

Alongside the KYC work we built strong customer authentication, the on and off ramps, payment rails on PIX, NPP and SPEI, and real-time transaction monitoring with on-chain screening.

The client went from four KYC vendors to one, with a single flow for compliance to audit. Cost per verified user went down, and the share of verifications that pass went up.