In March 2017 the European Commission issued an encouraging paper setting out an action plan to assist the development of better consumer financial services across the single market. Section 4 of the paper in particular focuses on digital services.
It is pleasing to see regulators doing all they can to get out of the way of technological developments while at the same time fulfilling their role as a protector of consumers.
In the KYC space the paper notes that :
‘Innovators are developing new ways to identify and authenticate customers. ‘RegTech’ could change markets by automating checks on companies, people and ID documents to meet know-your-customer requirements through remote identification and to tackle fraud issues. The use of electronic identity schemes, as set out in eIDAS, would make it possible to open a bank account on-line while meeting the strong requirements for customer identity proofing and verification for know-your-customer or customer due diligence purposes.’