MAS reviving its electronic know-your-customer project

Singapore

THE Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) will have a second go at its failed electronic know-your-customer (e-KYC) project, said MAS managing director Ravi Menon on Wednesday.

The centralised KYC utility idea was first proposed in 2017, and was meant to allow financial institutions to identify and verify potential customers' details in a seamless way.

The e-KYC utility would have created a more efficient way of checking against sanctions and blacklists.

It could have fundamentally changed the way banks labour through documents to block illicit funds from money laundering or terrorism financing activities being channelled through the banking system here.

But in 2018, MAS announced it as a failure then. While the technology worked, it was far too expensive to implement, said Mr Menon. "We are taking another crack at it," he said at a press conference to launch the Bank for International Settlements' (BIS) innovation hub in Singapore. This time, MAS will look at a "less …