Client onboarding is where regulated businesses lose money twice: once when the process is slow enough to kill a deal, and again when it is loose enough to let a fraudulent one through.
Kord, a UK fintech founded in 2020 by chief executive James Owusu, sells a single system that handles identity verification, anti-money laundering and compliance checks, digital document signing, and payment collection. It replaces the patchwork of separate tools most firms assemble as they grow.
The company’s argument is that AI-enabled fraud has raised the bar for verification. Deepfakes and synthetic identities make document checks alone insufficient, pushing demand toward multi-source verification and third-party screening.
The commercial case rests on friction. High-value transactions such as property sales or legal settlements fall apart over administrative delays, costs the company estimates run to hundreds of millions of pounds a year across the UK economy.
Regulated sectors have been slow to consolidate compliance tooling because switching costs are high and audit trails must remain intact through any migration.
