Know Your Business (KYB) checks are meant to keep criminal money out of the financial system. In practice they are slow and expensive, and little criminal money is ever recovered: Europol found that between 2010 and 2014 only about 2.2% of the estimated proceeds of crime in the EU were provisionally seized or frozen, and about 1.1% finally confiscated (Europol, Does crime still pay?).
Where the time and money go
The cost of compliance keeps rising. Financial crime compliance cost institutions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa an estimated $85 billion in 2023, according to a Forrester study for LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LexisNexis). Fenergo's 2023 survey of more than 1,100 bank executives put the average KYC review at 95 days and $2,598 per corporate client (Corporate Compliance Insights).
Most of that time is preparation, not judgement:
- collecting registry extracts, shareholder registers, UBO declarations and financial statements, and chasing the ones that are missing;
- working out who owns and controls the company through holding layers;
- checking every person and company against registries and sanctions lists;
- reading the financials for signs of money laundering;
- writing it all up so a reviewer can follow the reasoning.
What AI agents can take over
Each of those steps can be handed to a specialised agent. Adient runs six in a fixed order: document processing, company structure, registry check, sanctions screening, financial AML and the KYC report. The result is a draft report with an overall risk score and the findings behind it.
What does not change is who decides. The analyst reads the draft, corrects what the agents could not know, decides on missing documents and generates the final report. Every agent action and every analyst note is kept, so the decision can be explained later.