Know Your Customer is collaborating with Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) on real-time KYC for SME clients via the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Commercial Data Interchange, the companies said on 28 July 2025. The work automates company-search data retrieval through the CDI API and helps unravel complex ultimate beneficial owner structures for account opening.
Stephen Man, head of wealth management and retail banking at Standard Chartered Hong Kong, said the partnership supports digital transformation and non-face-to-face SME applications as the bank participates in CDI. Claus Christensen, chief executive and co-founder of Know Your Customer, said the firm was founded in Hong Kong almost a decade ago after he saw first-hand the onboarding friction SMEs face.
Know Your Customer describes itself as a regtech with registry coverage in more than 140 countries and AI-powered automation, with offices including Singapore, Dublin, London and Shanghai. Financing-efficiency gains cited in the joint release are bank and vendor expectations rather than independently audited outcomes.
The collaboration is presented as part of Hong Kong’s broader push to digitise SME banking via shared commercial data rails rather than a proprietary bank-only registry feed.