Autonomous AI Agents for KYC and Onboarding
Onboarding at scale
Capacity without scaling headcount
OpEx reduction across onboarding
Autonomous AI Agents for KYC and Onboarding
Onboarding at scale
Capacity without scaling headcount
OpEx reduction across onboarding
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What Is Agentic KYC and Onboarding Automation?
Agentic KYC and onboarding runs identity verification and onboarding as one governed process, from first customer input to an onboarding outcome, while you stay in control.
Most KYC “automation” digitizes fragments, then leaves your teams to reconcile the flow across KYC, AML, risk, and onboarding systems. Under volume, cases stall in queues, handoffs multiply, and exceptions become the default operating mode. The result is predictable: inconsistent decisions, customer drop-off, and operational cost that scales linearly with demand.
Otera replaces that model with governed, end-to-end autonomous operations. Specialized AI agents interpret onboarding inputs, extract and validate identity evidence, screen against AML, PEP and sanctions controls, map beneficial ownership, apply your institution’s policies, and produce an onboarding outcome with complete traceability. Every step is auditable, and every decision is tied back to evidence and policy so compliance can stand behind the result.
Meet Otera’s AI Agents for KYC and Onboarding
Our agents are built for regulated financial workflows and governed for accuracy, explainability, and compliance.
The impact
Every compliance decision on the page depends on this agent getting identity right first. When a single customer appears as three different people across screening databases because their name was transliterated differently on a passport, a utility bill, and a corporate filing, everything downstream fails: false positives multiply, risk assessments diverge, and audits surface decisions the institution cannot reconstruct. This agent eliminates that failure at the source.
How it works
- Interprets identity documents across formats, languages, and quality levels, resolving transliterated names across Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts into a single authoritative identity record
- Normalizes names, addresses, dates, and national identifiers into structured fields regardless of issuance country or document convention
- Flags conflicting or implausible identity information: expired documents alongside current ones, address histories that contradict declared residency, name variations that exceed plausible transliteration drift
- Produces a validated identity object that every downstream agent consumes directly, with no reinterpretation or manual re-entry
Why it matters
Identity failures trigger the most expensive remediation programs in compliance: portfolio-wide lookbacks, enhanced regulatory supervision, and enforcement actions tied to inadequate customer identification. This agent makes identity assembly deterministic, so every downstream decision starts from a foundation the institution can defend.
The impact
When two analysts extract data from the same bank statement and reach different conclusions about a customer’s income, the institution has a fair-treatment problem regulators will not dismiss as a training issue. Every onboarding decision rests on evidence, and that evidence arrives in formats that vary by institution, employer, country, and language. This agent converts documentary evidence into structured, compliance-ready data linked to the customer profile, making the evidentiary foundation of every decision deterministic.
How it works
- Extracts financial data, income figures, and address details from bank statements, payslips, tax documents, and verification records across 50+ country-specific formats, including non-Latin scripts and handwritten annotations
- Cross-validates extracted values against declared information, flagging discrepancies between stated income and actual bank statement activity
- Detects implausible or inconsistent data: income figures that contradict employment type, address histories with unexplained gaps, activity patterns that conflict with declared source of funds
- Links all normalized data directly to the onboarding record, creating a single evidentiary layer downstream agents and reviewers consume without reprocessing
Why it matters
Inconsistent data capture creates fair-treatment risk at portfolio scale. Different analysts producing different outcomes from identical evidence is exactly what triggers remediation lookbacks across thousands of cases. This agent applies identical extraction logic to every document, so decisions are consistent and defensible across jurisdictions, offices, and customer types.
The impact
Screening is where the highest-consequence KYC failures originate. This agent surfaces non-onboardable customers before the institution invests hours on cases that should never have progressed, while resolving the false-positive volume that paralyzes screening teams and forces rushed disposition under pressure.
How it works
- Connected to your data sources, runs real-time AML, PEP, sanctions, and adverse media checks with jurisdiction-specific logic: EU 6AMLD thresholds, US BSA/AML requirements, and MAS guidelines each enforced without analyst interpretation
- Correlates transliterated name variants, associated entities, and indirect PEP relationships across global and regional datasets to reduce false positives without increasing false negatives
- Assigns confidence-scored risk indicators with full context: the specific attributes that triggered the match, correlation strength, and recommended disposition
- Produces audit-ready screening records by default: every source consulted, every decision rationale captured so regulators can reconstruct logic years later
Why it matters
The largest AML enforcement actions, running into billions in fines, trace to screening programs that could not demonstrate consistent execution or complete audit trails. The downstream consequences are existential: enhanced supervision, loss of correspondent banking relationships, reputational damage that takes years to repair. This agent makes screening defensible at any scale by standardizing governed logic and recording evidence as the default output of every screening event.
The impact
Beneficial ownership is how sanctioned individuals, money launderers, and politically exposed persons enter the financial system undetected. Before any corporate relationship can be approved, the institution must resolve the full chain of holdings across layers, jurisdictions, and legal structures. A single corporate client with a four-layer holding structure across three jurisdictions with nominee directors at every level can take weeks to resolve manually, and still produce an incomplete picture.
How it works
- Extracts ownership structures from registration documents, annual filings, and regulatory submissions across jurisdictions, including handwritten amendments, multi-language filings, and registries with inconsistent data standards
- Connects to your data to map direct and indirect ownership paths across layered holdings, resolving multi-jurisdictional chains with varying thresholds, nominee arrangements, and circular structures where entities hold stakes in each other
- Runs AML, PEP, and sanctions checks via connected databases for each identified beneficial owner, applying the same screening rigor to indirect owners as to direct applicants
- Flags incomplete or ambiguous arrangements for specialist review, with context on what is resolved, what remains outstanding, and the specific regulatory risk each gap creates
Why it matters
Regulators treat ownership failures as evidence of systemic program weakness, routinely triggering portfolio-wide lookbacks that consume major operational capacity. This agent turns beneficial ownership into a governed process: resolving complex structures faster, screening every individual in the chain, and producing an auditable ownership record the institution can defend under any level of scrutiny.
The impact
The gap between written compliance policy and applied compliance policy is where regulatory failure lives. Every institution has clear rules on paper. In practice, those rules are interpreted differently by different analysts, in different offices, across different jurisdictions. Regulators don’t treat this as human error. They treat it as systemic program failure. This agent closes that gap by applying your policies and jurisdictional regulations to every case deterministically.
How it works
- Applies institution-specific policies and regulatory requirements to each case, including documentation standards by customer type, risk classification, and jurisdiction
- Enforces multi-jurisdictional regulatory rules for cross-border onboarding without requiring analysts to determine which regime applies
- Flags risk threshold breaches, authority limit violations, and documentation gaps with the specific unmet requirement and action needed
- Produces explainable, decision-level compliance logs as a default output, generated during decisioning rather than reconstructed after the fact
Why it matters
Good rules applied inconsistently is what triggers consent orders and remediation programs costing hundreds of millions. The traditional response—more training and more QA sampling—adds cost without eliminating the root cause: human interpretation of rules that should be deterministic. This agent makes compliance executable, so every decision follows the same logic regardless of originating office or jurisdiction.
The impact
This agent controls the moment your customer will remember longest. When a decline arrives without context, in the wrong language, or when different channels show different statuses, the institution loses not just that customer but confidence in its competence. In regulated markets, right-to-explanation requirements mean a sound decision becomes a finding if communication misses jurisdictional standards.
How it works
- Generates decision communications calibrated to customer type, jurisdiction, and regulatory disclosure requirements, including EU right-to-explanation obligations and market-specific rejection rules
- Synchronizes outcomes across CRM, onboarding platforms, customer portals, email, and relationship manager workflows, eliminating channel-lag that creates contradictory information
- Records every communication event with full detail: what was sent, when, through which channel, and with what content
- Supports multilingual communication by default, with jurisdiction-appropriate language and formatting
Why it matters
Adverse-action disclosure rules and right-to-explanation requirements create compliance obligations around how decisions are communicated, not just how they are made. This agent turns the decisioning moment into a trust-building event: even rejections are delivered with clarity, speed, and compliance, and every message is governed and traceable.
Autonomous Agents for KYC and Onboarding
Adaptable Across All Onboarding Scenarios
Retail Banking
From account opening to identity verification and regulatory checks, onboarding executes under one governed flow.
Wealth Management
Complex client profiles, source-of-funds documentation, and ongoing eligibility validated with consistent oversight.
Corporate Onboarding
Multi-entity structures, ownership hierarchies, and jurisdiction-specific rules processed end to end.
Merchant Onboarding
Business identity, websites, MCCs, and risk indicators assessed with explainable, audit-ready outcomes.
Payment Services
Identity verification and compliance enforcement across cross-border flows and regional regulations.
Fintech Platforms
Onboarding scaled across markets using reusable building blocks with unified governance.
Velocity for Your Automation Team, Governance for Your Onboarding Team
For Your Automation Team: Build and scale KYC & onboarding workflows
A unified platform where guardrails are defined once and applied everywhere.
Before Otera
- Manual stitching across disconnected tools
- Multi-month cycles for new workflows
- Limited visibility across the process lifecycle
- Onboarding stalls under volume pressure
With Otera
- End-to-end automation, one governed platform
- Weeks to production with reusable agents
- Full observability for audits and operations
- Same-hour onboarding that scales infinitely
Production ready
Reusable Agents
For Your Onboarding Team: Governed, consistent onboarding at scale
A governed, straight-through process that delivers onboarding speed, compliance accuracy, and customer satisfaction.
Before Otera
- Inconsistent governance across regions and products
- Fragmented systems that don't share context
- Analyst capacity consumed by document review
- Compliance variability regulators treat as failure
With Otera
- Unified governance applied once, enforced everywhere
- Single case record, end-to-end continuity
- Human review reserved for genuine judgment
- Consistent compliance execution, every jurisdiction
Cycle time
Capacity
OpEx reduction
Get Unlimited Capacity at Lightspeed at a fraction of current OpEx
Achieve the highest possible automation rate without losing transparency or oversight.
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Frictionless onboarding experience
Submission to outcome in minutes, not days.
Faster time-to-market across segments
New products and geographies, same governed flow.
Reduced customer abandonment
Speed and clarity replace friction and silence.
Autonomous end-to-end onboarding
Volume scales without headcount or marginal cost.
Deterministic compliance execution
Same logic, every analyst, every jurisdiction.
Governance and auditability by design
Every decision recorded, rationale included, audit-ready.
The Autonomous movement has already begun
The world’s most regulated industries already use Otera for proven 90%+ end-to-end automation on mission-critical operations:
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100+ Prebuilt Agents for KYC and Onboarding
Deploy instantly across KYC, onboarding, verification, and compliance workflows.
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ID document agent
Unlimited formats, one structured identity record.
Bank statement agent
Raw statements into compliance-ready financial evidence.
Corporate registry agent
Ownership paths mapped across jurisdictions and layers.
Proof of address agent
Every format validated against declared residency.
AML screening agent
Jurisdiction-specific screening with confidence-scored rationale.
Compliance rule agent
Your policies enforced deterministically, every case.
Connect your existing infrastructure
Pioneering secure Agentic Automation
Trusted by leading Fortune 500 companies, Otera delivers best-in-class cyber security, data privacy and user trust with extensive encryption and infrastructure protection.
