When banks and financial institutes onboard new corporate customers, the process is often completely manual – making the process both cumbersome and costly. Now the fintech company Vilja presents a smart digital and fully automated solution.

– We can automatically sort low-risk companies from those companies with high risk. An automated process is much cheaper and significantly reduces the risk of manual errors. It also helps companies to stay complaint says Fredrik Ulvenholm, CEO at Vilja

The regulations from both Swedish and foreign authorities governing the financial market are continuously getting more comprehensive with the purpose to reduce the risk for money laundering and fraud. It requires a lot of work from banks and financial institutions to stay compliant.

The KYC (Know Your Customer) process for private individuals is fairly straightforward, but to do the corresponding control for corporate customers is far more complicated. To stay compliant, you need to do a KYC control of board members, principal owners, signatories and other key persons. Especially for companies operating internationally this can be a difficult and costly process.

– In principle, all major banks do this completely manually today. An administrator searches different registers and retrieves information that is checked against other registers. Here we see a significant risk of missing important information, and a company that should have been more carefully checked might be slipping through, explains Fredrik Ulvenholm.

Together with their customer Visma Finance, Vilja is now developing a digital solution to automate a large part of the work. It is available in the market in September. Since Vilja has financed part of the development, it will be made available to Vilja’s other customers.