Articles by Konstantin Rusakov 10

Onboarding a company is not the same as onboarding an individual. Behind every legal entity stands a chain of ownership, directors, founders, and ultimate beneficiaries, each of whom must be identified and checked against sanctions, PEP, and reputational databases. A KYB check (Know Your Business) is a set of procedures by which an organization establishes the legal standing, ownership structure, and reputation of a corporate customer or counterparty. Unlike KYC, where the object is an individual, KYB is directed at a legal entity and all persons associated with it: directors, founders, authorized signatories, and ultimate beneficiaries. The practical goal of KYB is to form a substantiated judgment: does the company exist de facto, does it operate lawfully, who stands behind it, and what risks does interacting with it carry. Without this judgment it is impossible to assign the customer a risk level, to fulfill the requirements of Federal Law 115-FZ and the FATF Recommendations, or to protect one's own business from regulatory and financial consequences.

Up to 95% of alerts in AML screening turn out to be false — each of them takes up the compliance team's time, slows down onboarding, and reduces conversion without adding real protection. In this article we break down how to configure thresholds, filtering rules, and escalation logic to cut the volume of manual reviews by tens of percent, preserve the speed of customer passage, and not raise regulatory risk.

Sanctions screening and AML verification of customers are a mandatory part of onboarding for financial and digital services, but it is precisely here that businesses most often lose conversion. Every extra second of waiting increases the share of drop-offs, and every missed match increases regulatory risk. In this article we break down how to design the architecture of AML screening within a KYC pipeline so that checks against sanctions lists, PEP databases, and terrorist lists take fractions of a second, false positives do not paralyze the compliance team, and the customer completes registration without noticeable delays.

Every day, online services, banks, and fintech companies receive thousands of scans and photographs of identity documents — and among them forgeries inevitably occur: from crude text replacement in a graphics editor to professionally made fakes with a correct MRZ and imitation of security features. A modern KYC system counters this not with a single check but with a chain of several independent layers — AI-OCR, template and checksum reconciliation, digital image forensics, biometric face matching, and analysis of dozens of anti-fraud signals from the user's device and behavior. Each layer closes off its own class of attacks, and their combination provides resilience to falsifications of varying complexity.

The machine-readable zone of a passport is the only element of the document where the owner's personal data is protected not only by print technology but also by mathematics: five check digits calculated using the ICAO algorithm capture any change of even a single character. In this article, we break down what the MRZ is, how its structure is arranged in the TD3 format, which fields and check digits to verify, and by what signs the MRZ makes it possible to distinguish a genuine passport from a forgery — manually or with the help of automated verification systems.

Document verification is the most resource-intensive stage of KYC: operators manually determine the document type, transfer data, cross-check fields and the MRZ, and every error results in a refusal, a delay, or missed fraud. AI-OCR removes this burden — from classification to the transfer of a structured result to the decision-making system takes less than a second, and manual review remains only for genuinely disputed cases. Below, we cover which steps document recognition automates in KYC, how the data extraction accuracy exceeds 99.8%, and how to configure routing so that no more than 10% of applications reach the operator.

The KYC process seems clear until the question of its real cost arises. Most companies know how much a single check costs — but do not know what each approved customer costs, taking into account repeat attempts, manual reviews, and abandoned sessions. Even fewer count the price of errors: a false rejection is not just a technical glitch but a direct loss of marketing budget and lost revenue; a false approval is a risk of fines reaching, in 2025, <a href="https://www.dfs.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2025/08/ea20250807-co-paxos-trust-co.pdf">tens of millions of dollars for a single incident</a>. This article offers concrete formulas and a calculation methodology that translate the economics of KYC from feelings into manageable indicators.

A KYC funnel loses users and approvals at the same time — and often for different reasons that tend to be lumped into a single problem. A low completion rate, high drop-off, excessive manual cases, a drawn-out time to decision — each of these symptoms has its own point of failure and requires separate diagnosis. In this article we break down how to measure the KYC funnel correctly, where it loses users and approvals at each of the three key stages, and which architectural and operational solutions increase conversion without slowing down the decision and without compromising compliance.

Entering international markets requires enhanced customer due diligence: in 2025, regulators tightened the KYC requirements for non-residents, made in-depth EDD verification mandatory, and increased control over sanctions compliance. Standard identification is not enough — companies need a comprehensive approach with jurisdiction risk assessment, verification of the sources of funds, and continuous monitoring. We break down the current KYC 2025 requirements for international clients and non-residents, the mandatory set of data and documents, a step-by-step online verification scheme, and technologies for automating global checks.

Remote customer verification (e-KYC) has become a mandatory element of digital business. The technology makes it possible to instantly verify a user's identity and the authenticity of their documents, and to automatically cross-check the data against official databases — all remotely, without a visit to the office. Let's break down what digital KYC is, how it differs from the traditional approach, and how the step-by-step remote identification process works.