Avanza Group to develop data for all banks: PBA signs contract for ‘know your customer’ platform

KARACHI: On behalf of its members, the Pakistan Banks’ Association (PBA) has signed a project contract with the Avanza Group for the development and execution of the country’s first blockchain-based national ‘electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC)’ banking platform.

The signing ceremony was held at the PBA office in Karachi on Thursday. The ceremony was attended by PBA Chairman Muhammad Aurangzeb, who is also the president of HBL, Akhter Javed, director BPRD SBP, Tawfiq Hussain, CEO of PBA, Waqas Mirza, and Omer Khan, the CEO of Avanza Solutions (Pvt) Ltd.

The eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer) project is part of the State Bank’s ongoing efforts to strengthen the control infrastructure on Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/ Terrorist Financing (TF) in the country. PBA has been overseeing the planning and management of the project on behalf of the banking industry, under the aegis of the State Bank of Pakistan.

In addition to strengthening AML controls, the deployment of this platform will enhance efficiencies at the participating banks and will result in improvement in customer experience, especially at the time of account opening, thus facilitating financial inclusion.

The Avanza Group’s eKYC platform, ‘Consonance’, is being implemented for PBA. The platform will use blockchain technology through which banks will be able to standardise and exchange, with customers’ consent, their details via a decentralised and self-regulated network.

This will be a support platform for Pakistan’s banking industry and all participating member banks will be able to perform assessments of their existing as well as new customers by utilising information/ data available with any other bank on ‘Consonance’.

Once utilised by a member bank, the eKYC data can be used by other banks for Customer Due Diligence (CDD), thus minimising the cost and effort in customer on-boarding and improving the customers’ account opening experience, thus facilitating financial inclusion.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023