The Bitcoin Bridge: kompany keeps KYB compliance up-to-date and removes headaches

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

How much do you know about “RegTech”? It stands for “regulatory technology” and it’s a fast-growing industry. International financial regulations are placing an ever-greater burden on companies to know not only about individuals they transact with, but also entire business entities. RegTech firm kompany aims to keep its clients fully informed and up to date with everything they need. Russell Perry and Peter Bainbridge-Clayton are here to tell us all about it on this week’s episode of The Bitcoin Bridge.

RegTech has “gone from being a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have,'” Russell says of the industry. The concept grew out of FinTech and it’s been around for a while, but it’s only in the last few years that it’s become recognized as its own business area. He says projections show it will be worth over US$100 billion a year—in the short term.

kompany focuses on KYB, or “Know Your Business.” That’s similar to KYC, but with many more layers, because it involves gathering and verifying information on business entities themselves and their actions over time, the people behind the businesses and company shareholders, etc. The KYB sector itself is growing at a compound annual growth rate of around 45% CAGR, and will be worth around US$12 billion a year in the near future.

Russell identifies a series of trends responsible for that growth. This includes a gradual switch from using static secondary-source data records (i.e. digitized paper records) to using digital information as a dynamic, primary source. This has necessitated “perpetual KYB.” A business doesn’t simply need to check up on the entities it engages in commerce with as a one-off occurrence, it needs to make sure everything is legitimate and compliant on a regular basis, perhaps once, twice or more per year.

“Everything is about real-time,” he says, and this means that KYB and RegTech need to be updating in real time as well—often to-the-transaction. If a partner or client business engages in a single suspicious transaction, you’ll need to know about it ASAP.

If you think managing all this information (and knowing what to manage, when and how) is a complex task, it is. And that’s where businesses like kompany see an opportunity. As Peter says, it’s not about aggregating data itself but aggregating access to data. kompany handles the sources and knows the requirements, and can package all the different elements of KYB together as its main service.

Enabling access to all that information, and making it both verifiable and fast, is going to require a blockchain that can also process data in real-time. The blockchain is BSV, which not only has unbounded capacity to scale, but does so at a reasonable price. Russell and Peter explain in the interview how kompany plans to use the BSV blockchain as its platform for accessing all that information, and how clients can make use of it without any prior knowledge of Bitcoin or blockchain-based networks. It’s a fascinating, if bewildering to some, field and kompany wants to make sure businesses can stay out of trouble without anyone losing sleep.

The Bitcoin Bridge comes out every Monday—subscribe to the CoinGeek YouTube channel so you don’t miss an episode, and also check out previous episodes on Streamanity.

Watch: CoinGeek Zurich presentation, RegTech on Blockchain – KYB on BSV