AML & KYC
Designed alongside customer experience, not against it. Compliance flows that regulators accept and customers complete.
The financial industry operates under some of the most stringent regulation in any sector, and AML and KYC obligations sit at the heart of it. Every product, every onboarding journey, and every cross-border relationship has to satisfy a regulatory framework that varies by jurisdiction, evolves continuously in response to new financial crime patterns and new technologies, and carries severe consequences for getting wrong.
At the same time, poorly designed compliance flows are quietly becoming the single largest source of customer drop-off in the digital onboarding journey — meaning the institutions that succeed are the ones that design compliance and customer experience together, rather than treating one as the cost of the other.
Banks, payment institutions, e-money issuers, fintechs, and crypto-asset service providers — they hold the obligation and ultimately answer to the regulator for it.
Firms that establish who the customer is, through document checks, biometric matching, electronic identification, and increasingly through emerging credential frameworks like EUDIW and mDL.
Suppliers of sanctions, PEP, and adverse-media data, alongside the screening engines that match customer records against them.
Systems that watch payment behaviour for anomalies, suspicious patterns, and emerging financial crime typologies, increasingly augmented by machine-learning models.
Platforms used by analysts to triage alerts, investigate cases, and prepare regulatory filings.
Suppliers of beneficial ownership data, corporate registries, source-of-wealth and source-of-funds intelligence, and the niche data sets needed to handle higher-risk relationships.
Authorities that set the rules, receive the filings, and supervise the institutions, with frameworks varying significantly by jurisdiction (AMLD6 and MiCA in Europe, BSA and FinCEN expectations in the United States, and equivalent regimes elsewhere).
Every AML and KYC programme is a specific arrangement in that the obligation cannot be outsourced even though almost all the work can. The regulator holds the institution accountable, but the institution holds itself together through identity verification providers, screening engines, monitoring platforms, and the analyst teams that operate them. A programme is judged on whether that distributed delivery still reads as one coherent control environment when the regulator looks at it — and on whether the institution can prove it does.
Our expertise sits at the intersection of regulatory fluency and practical implementation. We have worked across the full AML and KYC landscape, from designing onboarding journeys that meet the obligations of the relevant regimes without making the customer experience punitive, to advising on the broader compliance frameworks that institutions operate under.
Our consultants combine deep familiarity with the regulatory regimes that govern financial crime in Europe and the United States, understanding of how the technology and provider choices shape what a programme can actually deliver, and practical experience designing flows that regulators accept and customers complete.
For clients building or evolving a compliance proposition, we contribute across the journey from concept through architecture to launch. For investors and acquirers evaluating regulated businesses, we conduct compliance-focused due diligence, where regulatory exposure is one of the most consequential and most under-evaluated risks.