Using your own KYC vendor

Introduction

Sometimes, our clients would like to use another KYC vendor for various reasons - e.g. they have already integrated with that vendor, or their customers are international (Synctera KYC/KYB does not currently support non-U.S. customers). With Synctera, it is possible to use your own vendor for KYC/KYB, provided your sponsor bank approves your vendor.

Irrespective of how you verify your customers, your sponsor bank and Synctera need to be able to check in the Synctera Console how each customer was verified. This is mandatory because your sponsor bank needs to ensure compliance and to be able to show this information when they are undergoing regulatory audits. 

Required information to be captured while creating the customer 

Personal Customer:

Ensure that the following fields are captured and sent while creating a personal customer. 

• First Name
• Middle Name (if any)
• Last Name
• Date of Birth
• SSN 
  • If you don’t have SSN, use Unique_identifier
    • ITIN / SIN / Passport number 
• Street Address
• Address 2nd Line
• City 
• State
• Zip
• Phone
• Email

Related to the above, Synctera supports the concept of authorized users who do not need to undergo KYC to be issued a card or transact against an account (as long as the primary account holder has undergone KYC/KYB). To mark a customer as an authorized user, call https://dev.synctera.com/reference/createaccountrelationship and set the relationship type as Authorized_user. 

Business Customer:

Ensure that the following fields are captured and sent while creating a business customer. 

• Entity Name
• EIN
  • If you don’t have EIN, use Unique_Identifier
    • Business number / corporation registration number etc.
• For Sole Proprietorship, we will run the KYC on the owner
• Street Address
• Address 2nd Line
• City 
• State
• Zip
• Phone
• Formation Date
• Legal Structure
• Incorporation documents including Operating Agreement if available. You can attach documents using Synctera document service API https://dev.synctera.com/reference/createdocument

Ensure that the following fields are captured and sent for each owner of the business

• First Name
• Middle Name (if any)
• Last Name
• Date of Birth
• Ownership  - This can be set using account relationships 
  • Owner of, Beneficial Owner of, Managing person of
• % Ownership  - This can be set using account relationships
• SSN
  • If you don’t have SSN, use Unique_identifier
    • ITIN / SIN / Passport number 
• Street Address
• Address 2nd Line
• City 
• State
• Zip
• Phone
• email

Verify Customer / Business:

To record the external KYC/KYB verification, without which the customer/business will not be able to transact, you must call https://dev.synctera.com/reference/createverification. Please make note of the below points while calling this API:

• Pass the response of the external verification, in the vendor info field as a json blob. This information will then be visible on Synctera Console. Note that this json has to have the response object of the external KYB/KYC verification result. Please do not include links to external vendor websites or google drives where this information is stored. It has to be the actual verification result response object from your vendor which can be viewed in the Synctera Console as shown below. 
• Set the name of the external vendor is set in the vendor field under vendor_info

You must also upload all documents used to verify the customer / business externally, using Synctera document storage service and attach it to the customer. To do this, call https://dev.synctera.com/reference/createdocument by passing the customer/business resource ID.

• Also for any document that contains PII, please mark the document as encryption required, by setting the field ‘encryption’ as ‘Required’. Encrypted documents can be viewed in the Synctera Console only by those who have special permissions. Once you upload these documents, the documents will show up under customer/business detail. 

• All customers/business owners are expected to have a verified KYC, pass an initial watchlist check and also be enrolled for ongoing watchlist monitoring. If you can’t use your external vendor for watchlist verification or watchlist monitoring, you can use Synctera to only perform watchlist check/monitoring. To do this, call https://dev.synctera.com/reference/verifyadhoc to run a watchlist verification and we’ll automatically enroll the customers for ongoing watchlist monitoring. Please note that you have to make the KYC call to mark the customer/business owners as externally verified, before doing the watchlist check.