If you have opened a bank account in the last five years, you know the drill. Submit your ID proof. Submit your address proof. Get photographed. Sign a dozen forms. Wait for someone in the back office to verify everything. A week later, you are in.
Now open another account. Do it all over again.
This is the reality of KYC today. Every institution does the same checks, collects the same documents, and reaches the same conclusion — this person is who they say they are — but none of them trust the others' work. The result is an extraordinary waste of time, money, and human effort.
The Numbers Are Staggering
A typical bank spends somewhere between $15 and $60 per KYC verification, depending on the market and the level of assurance required. For a bank onboarding a million customers a year, that is tens of millions of dollars. Multiply that across the financial sector, and you are looking at billions annually — all spent on doing the same thing over and over.
And here is the kicker: despite all that spending, fraud still happens. Document forgery, identity theft, synthetic identities — the current system catches some of it, but not enough.
How Tokenised KYC Changes the Game
Tokenised KYC flips the model on its head. Instead of every institution verifying the customer from scratch, a regulated entity (a bank, a telco, a government agency) does the KYC once and issues a verifiable credential attesting to the result.
That credential is cryptographically signed, tamper-evident, and under the control of the user. When they want to open an account at another institution, they present the credential instead of their documents. The verifying institution checks the signature, checks that the issuer is trusted, and — done. Onboarding in minutes, not days.
This is not theoretical. We have been building this into CREDEBL, and we are seeing real adoption in financial services and telecom.
What About Privacy?
The obvious question: does this mean the first bank knows everywhere I am opening accounts? No, and this is where verifiable credentials shine.
With selective disclosure, the user can present only the attributes needed — "I am over 18," not "I was born on this specific date." With zero-knowledge proofs, they can prove properties of their identity without revealing the identity itself. The credential is not a tracking mechanism. It is the opposite.
The Hard Part
The hard part is not the technology. The hard part is the trust framework. Who gets to be an issuer? How do verifiers know which issuers to trust? What happens when a credential is revoked?
These are governance problems, not engineering problems. And they are solvable. India's UIDAI ecosystem, Estonia's e-Residency, and Singapore's MyInfo all demonstrate that tokenised identity can work at scale when the governance is right.
Where We Are Headed
We believe that within five years, tokenised KYC will be the default for high-value financial transactions in most regulated markets. The cost savings alone will drive adoption, and the privacy benefits will make it a regulatory requirement.
The institutions that start building the infrastructure now — issuing credentials, accepting credentials, participating in trust frameworks — will be the ones that shape how the ecosystem evolves. The ones that wait will be playing catch-up.
Kirankalyan Kulkarni
CEO, AYANWORKS