Milestone's Nexstar launches know-your-customer product

Digital media technology company Milestone Group announced that Black Cactus Holdings - its joint venture partner in its subsidiary Nexstar - had launched a ‘know your customer’ (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) platform.

The AIM-traded firm said the new platform was part of a fintech solution designed to be used by organisations involved in banking, gaming, insurance and card programmes amongst others.

It said the platform tied into a number of major global databases to carry out background checks on both individuals and corporates, including criminal records, financial & personal history, sex offender registries, employment and payroll services databases, insurance and all other KYC and AML requirements.

The new KYC and AML platform had been developed to “significantly reduce” the processing time for each full background check application from weeks to days, making it more business responsive.

Milestone said the release of the product to the UK and European marketplace via Nexstar was to be accompanied by a marketing campaign commencing on 1 July, with a mobile version scheduled to be released in August 2017, which would embed biometric capabilities and computer vision for facial recognition.

Nexstar would charge clients a fee per case processed and an ongoing monthly fee, which would be determined separately for each client, offering the company an opportunity for immediate revenue generation.

The KYC platform had been designed to work on traditional banking and financial systems as well as new fintech technologies, with a “strong bias” towards blockchain, hyperledger, cryptocurrency and internet of things following several years of development, the board explained.

It explained that the product had been in development and pre-release in North America for the past year, and hds been used by more 200 companies as part of that process.

The platform had initially been created for the fintech sector, but with increased concerns over global security, it was described by Milestone as a “landmark development” bringing security checks and KYC into a real-time capability for all sectors, “substantially expanding” the company’s potential market base for the product.

“The KYC platform, which will be marketed by Milestone Group and its subsidiary Nexstar, is a significant leap forward for organisations globally keen to have the KYC processing time brought down from the current average of three weeks,” said Milestone CEO Deborah White.

“Having the ability to process this in a matter of minutes, safe in the knowledge that the time reduction has also been made more secure through the use of hyper ledger, is expected to interest many organisations globally.”