Opinion on "Den Sorte Svane" (The Black Swan)
Everybody in Denmark is talking about the TV 2 Danmark / Mads Brügger documentary "Den Sorte Svane" (The Black Swan) about organized criminals.
In my opinion, it's an excellent documentary that has lots of intensity and drama and a shocking exposure of well-run criminal operations. It includes documentation of tax evasion and money laundering with the help of more established parts of the Danish system, including lawyers, payment providers, politicians, and entrepreneurs.
The big remaining question is: What could have been done to prevent this? And what about all those that have not been mentioned? The companies that have unwillingly been involved with and done business with criminals. For example, landlords, law firms, financial institutions, suppliers, partners, and customers who never knew and never would have been there if they had.
This is what KYC is about!
This is also an excellent example of the difference between the need for low-complexity automated KYC (onboarding) and high-complexity KYC. Automated low-touch KYC is great for consumer onboarding but just doesn't cut it for more complex B2B relations.
Avallone.io only does the latter, and we do it well. We help our customers ask the right questions, gather the right data, evaluate the risk appropriately, and decide the right way forward! Companies should and need to reject counterparties if they don't satisfy KYC requirements. The Avallone collector product can help these efforts.
The consequence of non-compliance is going up. Everyone can expect to be asked about KYC more frequently, with more detailed questions and documentation requirements. Avallone also helps with this. Our responder product helps our customers organize KYC data to be always ready (almost) to respond to KYC requests. By being ready and organized, our customers help ease the pain, both for themselves and for the requesters to easily identify the good ones and focus on the bad ones!
By being great at KYC, our customers take responsibility and help fix a huge problem. Avallone was founded by Anders Meinert Jørgensen and me. We have backgrounds in tech, compliance, banking, and finance. We exist to help our customers with KYC. Some of our customers start up their KYC efforts with us, and others we mature, enable, and improve with technology, know-how, and services.
We love KYC, so you don't have to!
Read more about our take on the documentary.
Learn about Avallone's KYC collection tool.
