Replacing email-based KYC with a structured, AI-verified onboarding platform

The problem

KYC and KYB onboarding for financial platforms in Southeast Asia is genuinely painful. The process involves collecting identity documents, business registrations, director information, AML checks, suitability assessments, and risk evaluations — across multiple parties, multiple languages, and multiple regulatory frameworks.

Before PayConnect, all of this was done by email. A compliance officer would send a list of required documents. The applicant would reply with whatever they had. Back and forth would follow — missing documents, wrong formats, unclear requirements. For business onboarding (KYB), multiple directors and authorised signatories needed to contribute, which meant CC chains that included CEOs and board members who were too busy to respond promptly.

For international businesses, language was a compounding barrier. A compliance request written in English to a Japanese company's Thai subsidiary, CC'ing a Hong Kong director, was not going to move quickly.

Individual KYC

Individual onboarding covers Thai nationals and overseas applicants. The flow guides the user through identity verification, document submission, liveness check via ZOLOZ eKYC, suitability assessment, and risk evaluation — all in sequence, with clear explanations of what's required at each step and why.

Document requirements vary by nationality and region. A Thai national submitting a national ID card has a different flow to a UK national submitting a passport, which is different again from a US national with FATCA implications. The system handles this through configurable document requirement sets by region — the applicant sees only what's relevant to them, with examples of acceptable documents shown in context.

Correspondence — status updates, requests for additional information, clarification prompts — is delivered in the applicant's local language. A Japanese applicant gets Japanese. A Thai applicant gets Thai. This alone eliminated a significant category of delays.

Enterprise KYB

Business onboarding is more complex. A KYB application requires company registration documents, director identification, beneficial ownership declarations, AML screening across all parties, and authorised signatory verification. For larger businesses this means multiple people contributing to a single application — and previously, that meant multiple email threads that nobody had full visibility of.

Multi-party collaboration

PayConnect treats a KYB application as a shared workspace. The primary applicant creates the application and invites contributors — directors, compliance contacts, authorised signatories — each with their own login and a scoped view of what they need to complete. Progress is visible to everyone. No one is waiting on someone else without knowing it.

This removed the need for executives to be involved in the email chain at all. A CEO can be invited to complete their director verification independently, at a time that suits them, without being copied on every administrative exchange.

Regional document configuration

Different jurisdictions require different documents. A Thai company's requirements differ from a Singapore entity, which differ from a BVI holding company. Rather than presenting every possible document type and leaving applicants to figure out what applies to them, PayConnect uses a configurable requirements engine — the right documents for the right entity type in the right jurisdiction, with localised guidance and examples.

AI verification before human review

The core efficiency gain comes from a gate that didn't exist before: AI-assisted document verification before anything reaches the compliance team. Documents are checked for validity, completeness, and consistency automatically. Expired IDs, mismatched names, missing pages, unreadable uploads — all caught before a human reviewer sees the application.

This means that by the time a compliance officer opens an application, it's complete. The reviewer's job shifts from chasing missing information to making the actual compliance decision. That's the work they're qualified for.

The result is near-complete submissions on first review — dramatically reducing the back-and-forth that previously consumed most of the onboarding timeline.

The compliance review platform

PayConnect has two sides — the applicant experience and the compliance team's review platform. Most KYC products focus heavily on the former and treat the reviewer interface as an afterthought. I designed both with equal care.

The review platform presents compliance officers with a structured case view: all submitted documents, AI verification results, AML screening outputs, suitability scores, and risk evaluation summaries in one place. Every piece of information needed to make a decision is surfaced without requiring the reviewer to navigate between systems or dig through email attachments.

Actions available to the reviewer are clear and consequential: approve, request additional information with a specific prompt, escalate, or reject with a documented reason. Each action triggers the appropriate applicant-facing communication in the right language automatically.

AML checks and payment settlement

Beyond KYC and KYB, PayConnect handles AML screening against international watchlists and sanctions databases, and manages payment settlement for connected platforms. For Fraction Global, PayConnect is the onboarding and payment infrastructure layer — investors and issuers are onboarded through PayConnect before they access the investment platform.

The payment settlement flow handles the transfer of funds between parties in a compliant, auditable way — with clear status tracking for operations teams and an audit trail that satisfies both internal governance and regulatory reporting requirements.

What this solved

PayConnect is a good example of a problem that looks like a compliance problem but is actually a communication and coordination problem. The regulatory requirements were fixed. What was broken was the process around them.

The design work was about making a complicated, high-stakes process feel manageable to the people going through it — in their own language, at their own pace, with clear guidance at every step — while giving the compliance team the complete, structured information they need to do their job properly.