The working world has changed a lot in the past nine months. If your business provides Professional Services then you have had to overhaul your processes and move everything online where it is accessible from home offices, which involves spending additional money on non-revenue generating activities. The ability to have face-to-face interactions with new and existing clients has been completely disrupted at times. Those regular interactions we took for granted have been replaced by Zoom meetings or Hangouts.
The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML/CFT Act) places heavy compliance obligations on many of New Zealand’s institutions such as Law Firms, Accounting Practices, Banks, & Real Estate Agencies, to name a few.
“The Act ensures that businesses take appropriate measures to guard against money laundering and terrorism financing. This enhances the reputation of individual businesses, and of New Zealand as a safe place in which to do business.”
A large part of AML / CFT compliance is being able to confirm that your new (or existing) clients are who they say they are. This often includes meeting with the person in question, sighting their passport, drivers licence, utility bill, bank statement or other identity document, and making a certified copy. But what happens if the ability to have that face-to-face interaction during new customer on-boarding is taken away? Can the same level of compliance be achieved digitally online, and how?
This was one of the big problems we wanted to solve with Raytio - how to replicate the identity verification process digitally, online for a variety of reasons, including remote working. Once we had that nailed down, we had to think about how to securely store all of the data against the various entities, make it reusable on the client-side so they can share their verified information as and when they choose, and figure out how to best organise that information in order for businesses to easily search, download, and generate reports any time, but especially during audit time.
Raytio has recently moved into the beta phase and we are on-boarding our first few companies for beta testing. While there has been a big move toward remote working over the past few years anyway, the covid-19 pandemic has forced all businesses to change their processes to allow for ‘business as usual’ from home. This means it’s all the more important to get Raytio in to general availability as soon as possible.
For now Raytio has a tight focus on building an identity proofing solution for Law firms, Accounting Practices and Real Estate Agencies. These businesses need to meet AML / CFT compliance on a daily basis as part of standard Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks.
If you are a compliance officer within one of these areas who feels that your current AML / CFT compliance processes are more time-consuming than they should be due to double handling or using multiple solutions that don’t integrate, or that there are gaps in the current products you use, please get in contact with us. We want you to be a part of the exciting journey to refine and improve Raytio, influence our direction and achieve our goal, which is to build the best online identity verification platform in New Zealand.