herseycokguzelolacakIf you had any doubts that Know-Your-Customer laws were evil, here is one very good reason: personal data of 1 BILLION people just leaked.
The core purpose of KYC - to make it harder to launder money, and for the ultra rich to hide away their ill gotten gains - is not evil, far from it.
The fact the very same people which benefit from a perception that KYC is evil, are the same people making the decisions which directly lead to data breaches, is obviously a complete coincidence!
There’s also an execution problem.
Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.
“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.