Adedayo Adejobi
As part of efforts to curb fictitious address verification during the mandatory Know Your Customer (KYC) procedure in banks and other financial institutions, DataPro, one of the leading compliance Solutions Companies, has introduced the capturing of the Global Positioning System (GPS) featuring the latitude and longitude of an address.
Speaking to journalists in Lagos, the Executive Director, Operations of the company, Mr. Oladele Adeoye explained that ”since the company pioneered the outsourcing of address verification by banks in 2010, one major challenge has been how to have a fool-proof method of documenting the process”.
He said: “With the recent introduction of our mobile application, the company is now able to completely eliminate fictitious address verification by capturing the GPS, photograph and all other physical characteristics of any address in Nigeria on-line and real time.”
He added: ”The mobile application would eliminate all paper work, guaranty proof-of-work and achieve robust turn-around-time.”
By virtue of Section 3 of the Money Laundering Prohibition Act (MPLA) 2011 ( As Amended) all Financial Institutions are mandated to conduct the KYC procedure, which involves the identification and verification of the customers demographics of name and address before establishing any business relationship with the customer. This, the company said “is to ascertain that the customer is who he says he is, and also confirm if he is the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO).”
Adeoye however noted that this process is fraught with a lot of bottle-necks in Nigeria because the country does not have a comprehensive, reliable and up-to-date database of names and addresses of all its citizens.
Financial institutions are thus saddled with the task of using both secondary and primary techniques of verification to meet this statutory obligation which has exposed a lot of their employees to professional hazards.
In order to eliminate these field hazards and enable the bank employees concentrate on their core competence, DataPro brought outsourcing of the primary technique which is address verification to the industry.
