KYC Automation for Banks, Down to Every Owner

Annual cost reduction on the corporate book: $7.2M to $8.6M.

The corporate file no longer unfolds one analyst at a time. It unfolds all at once.

A retail applicant is one person with one passport. A corporate applicant is a question that keeps unfolding.

• Behind each entity sits a structure. A holding company, sometimes two, sometimes in a different jurisdiction, and behind that the natural persons who ultimately own or control it.
• Every beneficial owner needs what a retail applicant needs. Identity verified, documents authenticated, sanctions, PEP, and adverse-media screening run, a risk rating computed. One corporate file is many retail files.
• $2,001 to $2,500 per corporate KYC review. At 8,000 clients a year on a $2,250 midpoint, that is an $18.0M line before anything else in onboarding is counted. A large institution can spend up to $35M.
• Weeks, because the steps are serialised behind one analyst. No single step is slow. The case stalls every time it waits on a document the client has not sent.
• The highest-value customer has the worst experience. The corporate client is worth a hundred times the retail one, and it is the corporate client sitting in the longest queue.
• More analysts and better checklists did not touch the constraint. The work is inherently parallel and was being executed serially.

• Clean files clear straight through, with the rationale recorded. Anything the system is not confident about routes to a named human, so analysts see exceptions rather than volume.
• Documents are read and verified rather than keyed. Identity documents, proofs of address, and income records extracted and authenticated, with the untrusted-file handling in the tightest boundary in the system.
• Screening noise is absorbed before it reaches a person. Sanctions, PEP, and adverse-media alerts are worked the way an analyst would work them, so what arrives at the queue is worth a human.
• Beneficial owners are resolved and screened in parallel. One configured environment forks per person, so a corporate structure unfolds all at once rather than one analyst at a time.
• Every decision carries a replayable rationale. Including the clears, logged as the work happens rather than reconstructed on request.
• Customer data stays inside the bank's boundary. Control plane and storage in the bank's own region, each case in its own guest kernel, with egress allowlisted in the kernel to approved list and registry providers and nothing else.
• The regulated decision stays with a human. Every genuine hit and every low-confidence case goes to a named reviewer by policy. CreateOS is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified.

The corporate file no longer unfolds one analyst at a time. It unfolds all at once.

• $7.2M to $8.6M a year on an $18.0M corporate line. 40% is the conservative floor we commit to in a pilot, 48% the top of our own modelled range rather than a published benchmark. Cost per case falls from $2,250 to roughly $1,150 to $1,350.
• The corporate cut is smaller than the retail cut, honestly stated. Retail falls by around 70%, corporate by 40% to 49%, because a corporate file carries irreducible judgment that a retail one does not.
• Weeks to one or two days. The number the business side cares about, on a segment where the account is worth orders of magnitude more than a retail one.
• Where the savings come from, in order of size. Parallel processing of beneficial owners, which removes the queue entirely; de-duplication and pre-clearing of screening false positives across the structure; then the document and extraction work.

• Weeks 1 to 2, baseline. Measure the bank's actual cost per corporate review, cycle time, average number of beneficial owners per file, straight-through rate, and false-positive rate. This becomes the contract's yardstick and protects both sides in procurement.
• Weeks 2 to 6, build and integrate. Stand up the agent crew, integrate to the bank's document store, corporate registries, identity sources, and screening providers along allowlisted paths, deploy self-hosted inside the bank's boundary. Corporate integration surface is wider than retail and this is planned for openly.
• Weeks 6 to 8, shadow run. Agents process real corporate files in parallel with the human team without making binding decisions. Ownership chains resolved by the agent are compared against the chains resolved by analysts. Missed control relationships, not just missed persons, are what gets watched.
• Week 8 onward, controlled go-live. Straight-through processing switched on for simple structures first, single-jurisdiction entities with a shallow ownership chain, expanding into layered and cross-border structures as the audit record builds. Humans on every exception throughout.

Success criteria, agreed up front: cost per corporate review down at least 40%, cycle time under 2 days, corporate straight-through rate of 15% or better, extraction accuracy of 95% or better, 100% audit coverage of every automated decision and every link in every ownership chain.