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A complete guide to implementing an end to end KYC process

Darren Neil

Darren Neil

KYC Specialist

A complete guide to implementing an end to end KYC process

You may feel your current Know Your Customer (KYC) onboarding process isn’t working as it should. Maybe your KYC workflows are stitched together using multiple tools and vendors, causing confusion, or perhaps you still rely heavily on manual reviews, which slows down onboarding for customers who expect to be verified in minutes, not days.

As you start to scale or expand into new markets, the complexity only grows: your match rates are not as high as they could be, you’re struggling to keep up with shifting regional regulations, and if your KYC process isn’t centralised in one place, the risk of compliance gaps increases.

The result is that it costs so much to onboard a customer that the ROI is simply not high enough to scale efficiently. Beyond operational costs, financial institutions also face reputational damage and regulatory penalties when KYC procedures fail to prevent fraud.

This guide is designed to help you fix that. We’ll go over what exactly an end to end KYC process involves, how to build one that’s automated and compliant across jurisdictions, and what to look for when choosing an all-in-one KYC provider that can help you streamline onboarding operations.

In this article:

  • What an end to end KYC process involves: a checklist
  • How to implement the ideal end to end KYC process
  • Why it makes sense to work with an end to end KYC provider (and how to pick the best one)
  • Why choose GBG Go as your end to end KYC solution
  • How GBG helped a retail lending client make more accurate decisions, automate approvals, and achieve a 5:1 ROI

As a leading global identity verification company, we built our end to end KYC product, GBG Go, based on 30+ years of experience. To simplify your KYC onboarding right away, request a demo.

What an end to end KYC process involves: a checklist

Set customer acceptance policies (CAP)
Define which customers fall within your risk appetite and identify prohibited categories, such as sanctioned individuals or anonymous accounts. Create a risk-scoring model for eligible customers: classify individuals as low, medium, or high risk based on jurisdiction, product type, and other factors. Set down escalation paths for higher-risk cases: e.g., what further evidence is required. Write out the CAP as a formal document, publish it internally, and review it regularly to ensure continuous compliance.
Collect and verify identity information
Gather basic identity and contact information from the customer and trusted, authoritative sources. Capture and authenticate identification documents, such as a passport or a driver’s license. You can do so manually or with automated tools. Capture a selfie or live video of the customer for biometric comparison. E.g., use facial matching technology to compare the selfie against an ID photo or run a liveness detection test. Follow rules for minor mismatches like transliteration differences and escalate major discrepancies like altered documents or duplicate identities.
Perform customer due diligence (CDD)
Screen the customer against global risk databases like sanctions, PEP, and adverse media watchlists. Evaluate the customer’s risk using the criteria in your CAP and assign them a risk rating based on your scoring model. Carry out enhanced due diligence (EDD) for higher-risk customers. I.e., obtain additional documents or route the customer for human review. Document all screening results, as well as decisions and escalation paths, so that you can be audit-ready with clean records.
Conduct ongoing monitoring
After approval, continuously rescreen customers against sanctions, PEP, and adverse media watchlists. Set rescreening frequency based on risk level and automatic triggers for when a change occurs, such as a new sanctions match. Sync real-time monitoring updates directly into your CRM tools to keep commercial and compliance teams aligned. Maintain a full audit trail of every review, re-screening, and alerts for regulatory compliance reporting.

How to implement the ideal end to end KYC process

To build an end to end KYC process that’s fast and compliant at scale, you need a system that works. Here’s how to do that:

1. Unify all KYC components under one vendor

Over time, your KYC processes may have become fragmented across multiple vendors, plus separate tools for case management, audit logs, and communication. This fragmentation is the number one cause of KYC inefficiency.

When your teams are forced to manage several technical integrations, toggle between dashboards, and move data from one system to another, it adds friction and introduces the risk of compliance gaps because of siloed data.

What you can do to remove fragmentation:

  • Bring every KYC function into one onboarding flow under a single platform. Partner with a KYC provider that handles document verification, biometric checks, sanctions and Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) screening, and ongoing monitoring natively so that you can have one partner instead of multiple.
  • Centralise all case data to create a full audit trail in one place. Rather than switch between different dashboards to track decisioning or review risk level, compliance teams can view every individual as a complete case file with all information included, from every verification and decisioning rationale to reviewer notes.
  • Automate data syncing between your systems. For example, enable your KYC platform to automatically sync with your customer relationship management tool so that compliance and commercial teams stay aligned.

2. Automate routine checks and build flows based on custom decisioning logic

Automating KYC isn’t a simple matter of offloading all compliance work onto a hands-off engine. It’s more about automating routine checks that don’t require direct human oversight so that compliance teams can focus on reviewing complex cases.

In short, automation serves to make KYC quicker and smarter while enabling compliance.

What you can do to automate KYC intelligently:

  • Automate standard checks. For example, document authentication can be done via smart capture ID technology, and the ID can be compared against the user’s selfie with face-matching algorithms and deepfake injection attack detection.
  • Design workflows that adapt to each customer type based on factors like geography, risk score, and verification results. This ensures customers enjoy a faster onboarding experience tailored to their needs, while compliance teams get to focus on complex cases.
  • Enable automated, continuous monitoring against PEP, sanctions, and adverse media watchlists to ensure that each customer is compliant with regulations as their circumstances change over time.

3. Expand your data coverage and depth to more countries

To increase match rates, expanding the breadth and depth of your data sources is essential.

Without wide coverage that relies on authoritative sources in the markets where you operate, verification slows down, and drop-offs rise instead. Poor match rates also push more cases into manual reviews, which adds further friction on both sides.

What you can do to boost data breadth and accuracy:

  • Avoid stitching together multiple local data vendors. This only adds fragmentation as you scale, and since data formats vary wildly between regions, you might need to deal with extra operational workload by standardising them all.
  • Work with a global KYC provider. The more authoritative datasets your KYC provider can access, the likelier it is to get high match rates. This is because you can automatically cross-check more databases, which improves verification accuracy and speed and speed while enabling a more robust risk assessment.
  • Ensure that all data updates in real-time to avoid false negatives and positives, and to maintain compliance over time.

With our GBG Go solution, you can verify identities in over 195 countries within a single platform. Book a call with one of our team experts to discuss how we can help you increase match rates and onboard more customers.

4. Put a reverification process in place to ensure ongoing KYC compliance

Re-running checks on all customers manually after they’ve onboarded is very resource-heavy. But ongoing due diligence is vital to catch risk early, meet regulatory requirements, and keep audits as smooth as possible.

A true end to end flow includes reverification. The key is to automate it intelligently so that it runs in the background.

What you can do to simplify reverification:

  • Set automated reverification frequency based on risk level, jurisdiction, and other factors. For example, low-risk customers can be reverified once in a few years and higher-risk customers more often.
  • Send automated notifications and requests to customers. If additional documentation or an ID reverification is needed, the system can trigger reminders within the customer portal. This helps minimise back-and-forth communication.
  • Centralise all reverification data in your case management system. Every re-check and update should be automatically logged to create a full audit trail for each customer. This also simplifies reviews throughout the customer’s lifecycle.

Why it makes sense to work with an end to end KYC provider (and how to pick the best one)

All the challenges we’ve spoken about so far stem from one thing: fragmented, manual processes within KYC. When your teams operate in silos, you spend more time managing the KYC process itself than managing risk and compliance.

This is why many companies are now moving toward automated end to end KYC platforms: solutions that bring every part of the customer verification journey into one unified system.

With an automated end to end KYC provider, you get to:

  • Simplify internal operations because you don’t need to juggle multiple tools and vendors
  • Reduce compliance risk because your teams operate from a single source of truth, eliminating data gaps
  • Speed up customer onboarding through a seamless automated flow with no redirects or lengthy approval times
  • Ultimately cut operational costs and increase pass rates, boosting your return on investment and supporting your scaling goals

However, not all KYC providers are designed the same. There are subtle, yet important, differences to keep in mind, from data coverage to local regulatory expertise.

Ideally, choose a KYC partner that enables you to:

  1. Set up custom onboarding flows between various KYC components for smarter resource allocation: Rather than force each customer through a static sequence of verification steps that slows down low-risk users, look for a provider that dynamically adjusts customer routes based on factors like risk level, geography, and verification results. This speeds up onboarding and ensures you invest resources where they’re truly needed, such as higher-risk cases that require further review.
  2. Increase match rates by connecting to the right global authoritative data sources and with compliance experts on your side: As you expand into new markets, you need broad coverage that relies on trusted databases to be able to cross-check more sources and increase verification accuracy. This, in turn, drives up match rates. Your provider should also provide strong compliance expertise: for example, they ought to help you navigate high-risk sectors like online gaming or jurisdictions.
  3. Offer a customisable, user-friendly interface that makes for a fantastic customer experience: KYC isn’t just a compliance requirement – it’s also the customer’s first impression of your company. A clunky or off-brand interface can hurt completion rates and flood your team with support tickets. Ideally, you want a branded interface that feels native to your product rather than a third-party redirect. You should also be able to remove or reorder steps as you see fit, hide irrelevant fields, and adapt the language and document types to the customer’s region.
  4. Integrate the KYC solution easily into your systems: The easier it is to integrate the end to end KYC product into your systems, the quicker you can go live and onboard more customers. The ideal solution should slot seamlessly into your existing tech stack. Look for providers with robust SDKs, flexible APIs, seamless data syncing between systems, and strong documentation and support to speed up implementation time.

Why choose GBG Go as your end to end KYC solution

We’re a global identity technology company with 30 years of experience helping every business in the world connect safely with every genuine identity in the world.

We designed our end to end KYC product, GBG Go, as one platform to solve all your identity needs. Helping you verify identities and authenticate documents in over 195 countries, the solution comes with a broad range of identity, risk, and fraud capabilities, from age verification and biometrics to PEPs, sanctions, and adverse media screening.

Here are a few reasons businesses choose to work with us:

1. Maximise pass rates and speed up onboarding with every KYC component in one tool

With our solution, you can set decisioning logic, oversee case management, receive updates, and interact with other team members – all within one unified platform.

What’s more, our product relies on automated dynamic routing to send customers through different verification flows based on custom factors like geography or risk level, all of which is decided and pre-set by your teams. Rather than force customers through rigid, one-size-fits-all workflows that slow down onboarding, you can fast-track low-risk customers while routing higher-risk individuals for additional verification steps.

As a result, you get to allocate resources where truly necessary, and customer onboarding speeds up, increasing completion rates and enabling the highest ROI per customer onboarded.

Our workflows also come with fully white-label capabilities. Customers are onboarded through a sleek and user-friendly interface that’s displayed under your own brand, which turns KYC onboarding into a tech-savvy extension of your product rather than a third-party service.

And if your compliance or product teams need to reconfigure customer journeys, they can do so in a simple drag-and-drop flow – no need to rely on developers each time a change needs to be made.

2. Scale confidently with unmatched data coverage and compliance support

As you enter new markets, you soon discover that datasets differ wildly in format and quality, not to mention that regulatory requirements vary across jurisdictions.

As a global KYC provider that completes 800m identity checks annually, we are uniquely positioned to solve these exact challenges. Over the last 30 years, we’ve built an extensive and reliable data ecosystem around the world and developed deep compliance expertise to support you as you scale.

We’ve helped our customers:

  • Verify identities in 195 countries
  • Increase match rates even in regions where data is more sparse
  • Meet local (Anti-Money Laundering) AML/KYC requirements with our expert experience on KYC regulations
  • Eliminate the need for multiple regional vendors during international expansion

With the help of our compliance specialists, you can interpret complex local regulations, design policies that fit your risk appetite, and navigate highly regulated industries like gaming with more confidence. We also keep you aligned with evolving regional requirements so that you can scale without costly compliance missteps.

Inside the GBG Go platform, your compliance teams can also set custom risk thresholds and oversee compliance with case management. This means every customer is presented as a complete file with all information, verification results, decisions, and notes in one place. This visibility into your customer throughout their lifecycles makes for easier audits and fraud investigations.

And since all our global data sources and compliance features are delivered through one integration, there’s no need to rebuild workflows or add new vendors as you expand. Whether you launch in a new geography, increase customer volume, or introduce new products, GBG Go scales with you.

3. Assess risk and block fraud at first contact to decrease losses

With our GBG Trust product, a cross-industry dataset built from billions of identity insights across 28+ sectors, monitoring millions of transactions with powerful rules to deliver real-time fraud protection.

By positioning GBG Trust at the start of every KYC onboarding journey, each customer will get assigned a risk score between 1-100. Customers with a low risk score can proceed as usual, whereas identities with a higher risk score can be automatically routed for enhanced checks.

Alongside screening against PEP, sanctions, and adverse media watchlists, we’ve also embedded fraud checks directly into the onboarding flow:

  • Defend against deepfakes: Complete biometric security with deepfake injection attack detection on biometric verification when using smart capture SDKs and protection against face swap apps
  • Confirm genuine presence during onboarding: Certified passive liveness testing protects biometric verification against presentation attacks to the highest ISO/IEC standard
  • Protect against ID fraud: Detect tampering with forensic document testing for presence, photo and text substitution

But fraud protection doesn’t end at onboarding. GBG Go continues to monitor your customer network in real-time in order to catch emerging threats before they become a regulatory problem.

For example, you can:

  • Continuously re-screen customers against updated sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists
  • Trigger alerts when new fraud signals appear
  • Surface unusual identity or behavioural patterns through GBG Trust’s ongoing intelligence feed to support AML processes

Our mission is to enable safe and rewarding digital lives for genuine people, everywhere – and strong fraud protection is a vital part of that.

How GBG helped a retail lending client make more accurate decisions, automate approvals, and achieve a 5:1 ROI

One of our consumer lending clients was dealing with high acquisition costs due to the poor quality of the customers they were onboarding. They needed to find a way to evaluate identity risk before leads entered underwriting so that they could make more informed lending decisions and cut costs.

To solve this challenge, the customer deployed our identity data verification and risk-screening capabilities. They also used our API to build adaptive, low-friction journeys with an easy drag-and-drop UI.

What’s more, risk checks for email, location, device and contactability were run before identity verification, which helped filter out high-risk leads without adding unnecessary friction. In the meantime, real-time insights into mobile data, including SIM swaps or number porting, helped strengthen fraud prevention measures.

Once our solution was deployed at the top of the decisioning waterfall, they were able to eliminate the unnecessary costs of identity verification checks on high-risk customers and achieved a 5:1 ROI. The solution also accelerated approvals, increased lead conversion, and reduced fraud exposure.

Read the full case study here: Consumer lending case study

Partner with GBG to implement an end to end KYC process that speeds up onboarding with compliance front of mind

If you’re currently dealing with fragmented vendors, slow manual reviews, low match rates, and increasing regulatory pressure, implementing a fully end to end KYC process through a single global provider can reduce much of the operational overhead.

With our GBG Go product, for example, you get to:

  • Connect to over 80 global identity, risk, and fraud KYC components with a single API, intuitive UI and one contract
  • Visualise and deploy ready-made customer journey workflows or create your own to fit specific market segments, customer types, and risk rules
  • Investigate journey outcomes to support customer care, compliance and auditing – all in one place

Interested in learning more about how we can help you? Request a demo.

FAQs: End to end KYC process

A truly end to end KYC process connects every component of identity verification (document checks, biometrics, screening, decisioning, and ongoing monitoring) into one unified, automated flow. It also eliminates fragmentation across vendors and tools because all data, decisions, and audit trails live in a single system.

The best way to improve onboarding is to automate routine checks so that compliance teams can focus on more complex cases while low-risk customers are onboarded quicker. You should also try to consolidate your KYC verification components under one platform so teams no longer have to juggle multiple dashboards and manually move customer data between systems. This strengthens internal operations and reduces the risk of compliance gaps.

Look for a KYC platform that connects all KYC components, from identity data verification and biometrics to screening, case management, and monitoring, via a single integration. You should also ensure the interface is fully customisable, scalable, and easy for your teams to update without ongoing engineering support.

What’s more, the ideal end to end KYC provider offers dynamic workflow orchestration, broad global data coverage, and the compliance expertise needed to navigate complex jurisdictions.

GBG Go continuously screens customers against updated sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists and automatically triggers alerts when new risks or fraud signals appear. You can also set risk-based re-verification schedules and automated triggers for changes in customer activity or status. Every action, update, and review is logged in the case file, giving you a complete audit trail without manual effort.

Yes, GBG Go is designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing tech stack through flexible APIs, robust SDKs, and real-time data sync capabilities. You can embed KYC checks directly into your onboarding flows and sync outputs into your CRM or case management tools. This ensures your teams work from a single source of truth without abandoning the systems they already rely on.