Hugo Chamberlain is the chief commercial officer of UK-based smartKYC, which has been automating the KYC process since 2014. Data Management Insight spoke to Hugo to find out how the company is helping financial institutions streamline their onboarding processes.
Data Management Insight: Hello Hugo. When was smartKYC created and how does it serve financial institutions?
Hugo Chamberlain: smartKYC was founded in 2014 to help financial institutions automate and strengthen their client due diligence and risk screening processes. The platform enables organisations to screen individuals and companies across multiple intelligence sources including watchlists, adverse media, corporate registries, court records and other open-source intelligence. Using federated search, multilingual natural language processing and sophisticated entity matching, smartKYC creates a unified entity profile that captures identity, risk, network and opportunity insights. Financial institutions use smartKYC to support onboarding, enhanced due diligence, periodic KYC refresh and continuous monitoring, helping compliance teams detect risk faster while significantly reducing manual investigation workloads.
DMI: What is the driving mission behind smartKYC?
HC: The mission behind smartKYC is to transform how organisations understand and manage counterparty risk by turning fragmented information into structured intelligence. In an environment where financial institutions face increasing regulatory expectations and growing volumes of global data, smartKYC aims to make due diligence faster, more accurate and scalable. By combining artificial intelligence, multilingual natural language processing and sophisticated entity matching, the platform helps organisations build unified profiles of individuals and companies. This allows compliance teams to detect risk earlier, reduce manual investigative work and move from static, point-in-time checks toward continuous, intelligence-led risk monitoring across the entire client lifecycle.
DMI: What are the most common pain points that you solve for your clients?
HC: The most common challenge we solve is the time and complexity involved in conducting effective due diligence. Compliance teams often need to search multiple disconnected sources—watchlists, adverse media, corporate registries, court records and other OSINT—then manually reconcile results. This leads to duplicated effort, high false positives and limited visibility across a client’s lifecycle. smartKYC addresses this by automating federated searches across structured and unstructured data, applying multilingual NLP and entity matching to extract meaningful intelligence. The result is a unified entity profile that consolidates identity, risk, network and other insights, allowing analysts to focus on material risk rather than gathering and organising raw information.
DMI: What are the newest challenges that you are helping clients overcome?
HC: One of the newest challenges for organisations is managing risk intelligence at scale across increasingly complex networks of counterparties. Firms must now assess not only clients but also suppliers, intermediaries and associated parties, often across multiple jurisdictions. At the same time, the volume of available information — especially global media — has grown dramatically. This creates a signal-to-noise problem where analysts spend too much time reviewing duplicate or irrelevant information. smartKYC helps address this by combining automated intelligence extraction, contextual analysis and entity resolution to distinguish genuine risk developments from informational noise, allowing organisations to monitor risk across large populations of entities while maintaining clear audit trails and regulatory defensibility.
DMI: How is automation of KYC changing in the age of AI?
HC: AI is shifting KYC automation from simple data retrieval towards intelligence extraction and contextual understanding. Traditional systems could retrieve documents or search results but still rely heavily on analysts to interpret them. Modern AI techniques — including natural language processing and large language models — can now identify facts within unstructured data, classify risk signals and generate structured summaries. However, in regulated environments automation must remain explainable and controlled. At smartKYC we see AI augmenting analysts rather than replacing them. By structuring intelligence into clear categories and linking it to unified entity profiles, AI enables compliance teams to review risk more efficiently while maintaining transparency, auditability and human oversight.
DMI: What does smartKYC see as the next big thing in onboarding technology/data automation?
HC: The next major development in onboarding technology is the transition from point-in-time due diligence to continuous risk intelligence. Instead of treating onboarding as a one-off screening exercise, organisations are increasingly building unified entity profiles that evolve throughout the relationship lifecycle. These profiles can be enriched over time through monitoring, periodic refresh cycles and network analysis. Advances in AI, entity resolution and multilingual intelligence processing are making this possible. In the future, onboarding will become the starting point of a continuously updated risk profile, where changes in sanctions, media reporting, ownership structures or legal developments automatically update the intelligence associated with a client or counterparty.
DMI: What’s in the pipeline for smartKYC in 2026?
HC: In 2026 smartKYC will continue expanding its intelligence capabilities across both screening and monitoring. Key developments include enhanced automated Source of Wealth analysis, deeper network and associated party identification as well as further improvements to multilingual media monitoring through smartEYE. We are also investing in more advanced AI-driven summarisation and contextual analysis to help analysts interpret large volumes of risk information more quickly. Another focus is improving workflow automation around onboarding and lifecycle management so that intelligence generated by screening and monitoring can feed directly into operational compliance processes. Our goal is to make risk profiling increasingly continuous, structured and scalable across large populations of entities.
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