Introducing KUBE: banking sector hub for verified corporate data
Backed by its collaborative joint venture Isabel, Belgium’s four major banks have launched KUBE. This centralised data hub sets a new benchmark for verified KYC information sharing across financial institutions. As KUBE’s first partner and integrator, Harmoney assists banks in both contributing client data to KUBE and retrieving it in a fully regulatory compliant way. How exactly does this work? Let’s dive in.
What is the KUBE platform?
Maintaining an accurate, high-quality and up-to-date database of company data from corporate clients poses significant challenges for banks and other financial institutions. Establishing a regulatory-compliant and secure governance process for uploading and extracting this data requires a substantial IT effort for even the most forward-thinking and innovative of institutions. On top of this, many banks’ back offices still rely heavily on manual validation for corporate KYC verification. This time-consuming process extends to front offices and their tendency to use paper-based methods for onboarding corporate clients. Financial institutions that prioritise customer-centricity could drastically improve the customer experience by reusing verified corporate data for potential customers.
This is where KUBE comes into play. Belgium’s major banks have collaborated to design this universally accessible application, serving as a hub for sharing corporate data as part of standard Know Your Customer (KYC) processes. The main goal? To streamline and simplify the verification and maintenance of corporate identities for business and banks. The motivation is twofold: to accelerate service provision to end clients and to help prevent fraud and money laundering.
How it works: sharing business identity information
KUBE is designed to address a common compliance scenario for banks, streamlining both document capture and verification processes. With KUBE, financial institutions can gather data from existing or potential clients and upload them to the centralised KUBE database once they have been verified by their internal AML procedures (often managed entirely via our time-saving and fully compliant Harmoney platform). The secure KUBE database allows other banks to access this verified client information, provided they have their client's permission. This saves significant time, for example, when a corporate client wants to open a new account with a new bank after previously having completed the KYC vetting process with another institution.
Easy KUBE access through Harmoney
At Harmoney, we’re proud to be the first partner to integrate with KUBE. The three common KYC challenges in the financial sector that KUBE’s verified data hub tackles are exactly the same ones we address with Harmoney:
- Data collection delays and input errors
- Verification delays
- Compliance burden
Financial institutions that prefer not to develop their own tools and processes for data collection, verification and uploading can always rely on Harmoney for seamless integration with the KUBE database. Our efficient data identification and validation flows make it easy to verify and validate data, in turn accelerating the KYC process for banks. This minimises processing hiccups and allows compliance teams to focus on their high-risk cases that truly matter and require specialists intervention and assessment.
Active collaboration for a stronger banking sector
KUBE is built to be open and collaborative from the ground up. The more financial players participate in this ecosystem, the more benefits to everyone – both banks and their clients. Smart, centralised data sharing and open communication will help all financial institutions in the long run, particularly as compliance regulations become increasingly stringent. Instead of treating KYC as a one-time checklist, it's a continuous process for financial institutions. KUBE and Harmoney help to always have it covered, with full peace of mind.
Harmoney offers a cutting-edge digital platform that streamlines intricate onboarding and compliance procedures, featuring automated screening functionalities. Interested in discovering more about our innovative solution? Reach out to us for further details!