In this live episode recorded at the Singapore FinTech Festival, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Klaus, co‑founder of the regtech firm KYC. Klaus outlines the company’s origin in 2015, its two‑year technology build‑out, early focus on European banks, and strategic shift to Asia after the 2017 SFF, leading to tier‑1 bank customers in Singapore and Hong Kong. The conversation then dives into regulatory contrasts: the European “Scandinavian” model of public beneficial‑ownership registers versus the more opaque approaches in the US and Japan, and how Asian jurisdictions (Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China) are increasingly adopting transparent registries. Klaus highlights the proactive stance of regulators such as MAS and HKMA, which run dedicated regtech programmes. He discusses the challenges of creating KYC utilities—data‑sharing among banks is hampered by divergent incentives, though government‑run solutions like Singapore’s MyInfo provide a semi‑self‑sovereign identity framework with government‑backed data stamps. The dialogue moves to the concept of “perpetual KYC,” contrasting it with traditional periodic remediation (e.g., a case where an Australian bank had 72,000 stale corporate customers). Klaus explains how real‑time updates from company registries can trigger immediate compliance alerts, moving the industry toward continuous, day‑current KYC. The episode closes with KYC’s recent second‑place ASEAN award from MAS and the Singapore FinTech Association, underscoring its market traction and credibility.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Last podcast live from the Singapore FinTech Festival. And by coincidence, and miracles do happen, I've got Klaus with me from KYC. Klaus, welcome to our podcast. Can you explain just a bit about yourself and your company?
Thank you very much, Koen, for having me here on the podcast ad hoc. KYC was founded 2015 between an Irish co-founder and myself. I'm originally from Germany with the idea that we would automate the corporate onboarding for anti-money laundering purposes. And we took about 2 years to build the technology, a bit longer than we thought, and started out to work there, the Irish, UK, European banks and financial institutions. But immediately when we found 2017, the first Singapore FinTech Festival, decided Asia is actually much bigger and there's a lot more happening. And so we came to Singapore and Hong Kong in 2018, and I made it my home actually during 2018-19. And by now KYC arrived at a good stage where we have tier 1 banks and global financial institutions on our books as customers.
Oh, brilliant, amazing, and congratulations with this success story.
Thank you.
What is interesting to hear about this story is that you are a European, you came to Asia. So what are the differences if we talk about the trade KYC?
For KYC, the important point are regulations, obviously. And regulations are both different and similar. Actually, an interesting point about anti-money laundering regulation is the emphasis that regulators place on the availability of corporate ownership data. There's an important global dichotomy between how ownership of companies is viewed. In the US, in Japan, for example, the view is ownership of a corporation is none of your business except if it's your company. In Europe, we adopted this— I would call it a Scandinavian model. Transparency is the most important. Transparency helps everybody, and it's certainly good for anti-money laundering purposes. So company registries under anti-money laundering regulations in Europe after AMLD4 and D5, the directives from the EU, are obligated to hold beneficial ownership information. So that's a cultural difference where in Europe we would view this as public information and therefore it's open for solutions like ours that access this information. In Asia, they followed more and more the European model. Both Singapore, Hong Kong, even mainland China have very open data about the corporations, and the ownership is not private. So that is a similarity there. Where we see differences is how open the regulators are for automation, for regtech, regulatory technology, which is what we do. And we see the advantage really here in Asia, both MAS and the HKMA are extremely active. HKMA has a 2025 plan for regtech, and MAS has a whole series of initiatives to push regtech and use more regtech in financial institutions around here. So that's a big, important difference. It's also what makes these markets very interesting for us.
Well, I can only agree with you because in many regtech talks, then MIS is taken as the example. And talking about KYC, well, they were the first one with the public KYC register here in Singapore, but obviously not on the corporate side. Is that something they think about? Is that something that's been discussed in the market?
Certainly KYC utilities are always a big question. Can you not get together multiple companies, big banks, and share information with each other. In theory, that's always a good idea. Often it's in practice harder to implement, and the motivations of the individual players vastly are vastly different. For example, in every market there would be a few bigger players that have 80% or so of market. Those in KYC information, obviously they have 80% of the customer information.
Yeah.
They are not incentivized to share that information so much with all the smaller players. The smaller players would be really interested in getting a share of that, but they don't have anything to trade with. So utilities have that kind of problem. The government can step in, and MAS did that very well. Both the company registry here is extremely well organized, so it has information, is available. And there's resellers and people like us who make it really accessible. And for individuals, they build a very interesting model. Individual ID verification usually works in one of three ways. In the U.S., for example, you would rely on databases of previous instances where people have shown themselves to a bank. And verify them on the basis that their Social Security number and their name and their address matches each other. That's very weak validation of a person. In Europe, you would normally base it on a document like a photo ID.
Mm-hmm.
Passport, driving license, ID cards. And the utility model here in Singapore is interesting. It has— it's called MyInfo, and it has information about the person, but you cannot access it directly from the bank. You ask the end customer to log in and share that information with you.
Mm-hmm.
But you get that shared information with the stamp of approval of the government. So you have name, ID card, nationality, date of birth, and so on. All these absolutely secured. I think that's a very good model if you can secure it.
It's self-sovereign identity, actually.
It's almost that.
Sounds like it, at least.
It's not totally self because the government is involved and has the stamp of approval on, but it is similar to that. That is, the self-sovereign identity is like a 4th type where you're completely free of any authority and just own your data on a blockchain or in some way verified. Very interesting concept. very difficult to secure as well.
Yeah, but also very early days. I mean, Europe has made like an ambition to move into this, but as many things in Europe, it's not easy because there are many countries that need to come together and agree. I mean, it's a good thing that it's done together, but we'll see how that goes.
I think so too.
On the same token, it has been European legislation that ultimate beneficial owner registries had to be public. And that's not the case at all for many countries.
That is right, yes.
So that's something that you have to deal with, I suppose.
Fortunately, what is public often in many jurisdictions is company filing documents, and they are usually required to have something like an annual return with a list of shareholders in the registry. Now, these are of differing formats everywhere. Even in some jurisdictions, there's multiple formats for different company types, entity types. But these are readable if you put in the work, and that is one thing that our solution does. You can read the shareholders and then you can follow through. If you have a shareholder from a Singaporean company and that's maybe a Hong Kong company, then you go to Hong Kong and repeat the process and you follow through to the UBO. That is an alternative method to getting UBOs from having a straight-up UBO register that you just believe.
Klaus, we've been talking a lot about an early start of a process where you identify a customer. But, and I know a lot of banks are struggling with this, but what do you see as the next step to this?
We're talking about perpetual KYC as a goal. And I have to say, many banks struggle with the predecessor of that. That would be repetitive KYC. Usually you have KYC on a timer. Meaning for low-risk, medium-risk, high-risk cases, you usually have a schedule of 5 years, 3 years, 1 year maybe.
Depending.
Exactly, depending on risk, you do these and you have to repeat the KYC information from the customer. If you have a manual process like many banks would have at the moment, that is really difficult. And I remember there is a case of an unnamed Australian bank that came to us that had this problem, 72,000 company entities that had not been re-KYC'd for more than 10 years, and the regulator was tapping them for that. They were thinking of offboarding customers, firing customers, because they would not be able in a reasonable time to manually recertify that KYC.
So these are the famous remediation programs?
That is exactly it. Remediation is a huge problem just now. So we are far away in many cases from perpetual KYC where the information is kept current all the time. But with RegTech, that vision can be made a reality. And that is exactly what our tool does as well. Perpetual KYC is often seen as We have access to a database of company entities, and when the database changes, that is our signal when we want to update the company information for our customer.
Mm-hmm.
We believe that's actually not quite enough. That is perpetual KYC just on, on a schedule that you don't know because it's the schedule of the database refresh of the commercial database that you're using. I think our customers think that you can go further, and that is you can have perpetual KYC straight from the company registry information. Now, that's not that easy. You do have to repeatedly go there. There is limited availability of when things are refreshed and so on. But when you crack that with a tool like ours, you get day-current updates. a new director just came up for this company. Now we stop scanning for the old director in screening databases and we start for the new director and we flag that to the compliance team. And that level of compliance and perpetual KYC, I think that's where things are going.
That's where we're heading. Yeah.
Thank you, Koen, for having us. I have to say just one last thing that I have to bring in.
Oh, please, please.
Because something really that I just wanted to share, something really nice happened last night. MAS and SFA have a series of awards that they give out. They are really prestigious because you cannot buy one. You cannot invest in a table at a dinner and get one. It's one of these things where they really evaluate companies. We won second place in the ASEAN category, and that's, that's a big deal for us. I think we, we properly arrived here and made our, our mark.
You should have started with this, actually.
I know.
Congratulations to you.
I'm a humble guy. I like to share knowledge, actually.
I think that makes regtech so different than fintech, perhaps. But that's yet for another discussion. Thank you so much again, Klaus, for ad hoc being with me in this podcast. I liked the way you shared your insights in the world of KYC. So thank you very much. Thank you also to our audience for tuning in. And please stay tuned. This was the last one from the Singapore FinTech Festival, but there's many, many more news that will come on this channel. Thank you so much.
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