Societe Generale has revealed plans to open up to clients the KYC offering on its single-dealer SG Markets platform.

“We are currently developing our KYC offer massively into our platform for [our internal users]. We are going to open this offer to our clients by the end of the year,” Alain Fischer, chief digital officer of global banking and investor solutions at Societe Generale, tells WatersTechnology.

The KYC process can be painful and complex for banks, Fischer says. Currently, when a bank asks their clients to provide various KYC documents, they send them an email, and the client replies, attaching the files requested. The French bank’s digital offering aims at addressing this inefficient process by allowing clients to directly upload documents to a central platform. 

The KYC service will be made available to corporate clients first, followed by financial institutions. Societe Generale staff can already access the platform at kyc.sgmarkets.com.

“It is the same tool that we use internally to do the KYC for our clients today,” Fischer says. “So the concept is here. What we give to our clients, and what we use internally, will be exactly the same.”

Fischer says APIs are key to the KYC offering’s functioning. For example, the bank developed algorithms that classify clients’ documents—this can be re-used for similar cases across the firm. More and more clients want to get intelligence from the bank’s business services, but they don’t want to use their interfaces directly, preferring to plug into the bank’s system via APIs.

“In the KYC process we built several AI components that benefit all our staff involved in the workflows,” Fischer says. “We also use automation in legal document parsing, for example. We developed an API based on machine learning that is able to parse legal documents and slice it into different parts. It helps lawyers a lot because everything is already pre-fitted with a 90 percent accuracy rate, enabling them to save hours and hours of tedious work.”

The KYC offer is part of wider ambitions for SG Markets. Fischer foresees pushing more employee services to its clients.

“We develop many projects and APIs to enhance user experience and also to meet regulatory requirements. When we do it on the platform we are able in fact to re-use the same components, and probably in the future, to offer some of these services dedicated to our staff, to our clients,” Fischer says.