Why I'm Joining spektr

The only TV show I have ever watched again and again is Mad Men. I have seen all seven seasons through seven times and I'm due another go round. I used to think of myself as a Don Draper type; a searching, wistful man caught betwixt the old world and the new, but I'm told I'm more of a Roger. Mildly disappointing, but I wanted this post to channel Don's open letter to the tobacco industry.

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I am a KYC guy of a good few years, having done many of the jobs in KYC before KYC was even KYC. It was an account-opening process then; considered by many as something of a business prevention unit and I very quickly understood why. It always felt to me like we were almost looking for ways to not open an account and that always bothered me. Surely we can do better than reject an on-boarding, providing few solutions and very little insight as to why. [Note that I talk about account-opening but not periodic reviews here - these didn't really come into being for a while yet.]

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For as much as I understood there was a customer at the other end of this process, I also recognised it was an incredibly wasteful thing. Keying information from printed, paper documents, using my own card to buy registry extracts and keying in yet more data still. Comparing signatures with an actual magnifying glass and reading the minutiae of a Cayman Islands Segregated Portfolio Company's Articles felt like a wholly necessary and worthwhile task at the time, but the hours spent performing this work were likely a drain on my company's resources, despite its necessity.

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I believe now that the industry - and I don't mean the vendors, but the collective innovation of all participants - has largely solved for many of the labour-intensive processes performed by well-intentioned people like me. But there remains enormous expenditure on manual work associated with the now broadened in scope, maturer process for which the given initialism has entered the lexicon of the everyday person.

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It means there's still work to do.

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I've dedicated the last seven or eight years of my working life to approaching the KYC problem from the angle of the market participants in providing technological and data-driven solutions, while always understanding there is no 'solving' of financial crime per se, but rather an attempt to bring greater insights and capabilities to the good people taking up that fight on a daily basis, serving of their employers (and society as a whole).

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Today, this sees me join spektr, a rocketship purpose-built to fire lasers at the discrete processes and work that historically required disproportionate human effort, automating the very tasks that keep customer aspirations grounded. I've watched from a safe distance with my 3D glasses on for some time and observed the speed at which the team has been able to build and deploy agents in very niche and often tricky processes with seriously impressive results. And, having come to know the team over the course of a year or more, the words 'it is what it is' just don't come into their vocabulary. There isn't an acceptance of a status quo and this is precisely my own position since becoming familiar with the KYC process myself nearly 20 years ago.

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I know, I'm too young to have been doing this for 20 years, am I right?

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As it is, I have been saying for some time now that I want to make my job redundant; be it as the KYC guy doing the work in pouring over thousands of pages of documents, or this latter iteration, supplying the tools of the trade. I think it's OK to say that we can aspire to make ourselves redundant in some way or another, because the ingenuity that it takes to solve these problems will lead to us finding new ones to fix in the future.  

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1962 and the end of Season 2, Don lights a Lucky Strike on a flight to the aeronautics convention (which he ditched in favour of something more him), while the seminal Joe Meek-penned smash Telstar fires up, nodding toward a brave new world of exploration. Here in 2025, I see spektr and its crew already blazing a trail on its orbit; and how could I say no to joining a mission like this?

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Yours from outer space (Kent, England),

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Davie