Video: KYC Chain: How It Started and How It Helps Clients Manage Their Digital Identities via Blockc

Andrew Work speaks to Edmund Lowell, founder of KYC chain, at the Jumpstarter Competition sponsored by Alibaba Enterprise Ventures, Cyberport and HKSTP. KYC-CHAIN uses DLT technology to help both banks and clients to leverage submitted documents to be able to share with any party for a second time, while giving customers control and consent over where and with whom their data is shared.

Transcript:

NEXCHANGE: Hi, I’m Andrew Work for NexChange and today we’re down at the Jumpstarter competition at Cyberport where up to a million U.S. dollars are on offer for companies that are pitching.

I’m standing here with Edmund Lowell. He is the founder of KYC chain. He’s well known to people in the FinTech space in Hong Kong, one of the main players on the scene, and he is using blockchain technologies to solve KYC problems. Edmund, why don’t you tell us about why you got into this and why you’re so strongly motivated to do it?

EDMUND LOWELL: Sure, I started this company because I was working in a professional services company and we would go through a KYC process with a client. Then we’d hand over that same client to the bank, same document, same data , it would take the bank three or four weeks to get back to us and actually tell us ‘client got the account’ or in some cases ‘you didn’t get the account’. And then we’d have to start the whole process over again at a second financial institution. So I just found it to be very broken.

NEXCHANGE: That’s painful right, and how are you going to be solving that problem using your company KYC chain?

EDMUND LOWELL: Right, so what we do is help the customer and the bank leverage the documents that they’ve already submitted to be able to share it with whoever they want a second time. And we do that in a way that decentralized, that uses distributed ledger technology and allows the client to really have control and consent over where their data and who their data is shared with.

NEXCHANGE: And that’s important, the fact the client has control and consent over where their data goes but still the banks can verify it.