Sikoia is a London-based Fintech that helps financial services providers automate their customer verification. Sikoia gives access to structured customer data, consolidating it into a single, unified view for onboarding and producing valuable customer insights automatically. Our solutions are built for seamless integration into existing systems via API, or for direct use through its straightforward, ready-to-use Customer Evaluation Dashboard. Regulated by the FCA as an Open Banking provider (AISP) and credit reference agency, Sikoia is backed by leading institutional and venture capital investors.

Sikoia streamlines and automates part of the customer verification process for financial services providers that are still very much done manually today or require a multitude of data sources to make a decision.

Consider for example a consumer getting a mortgage or a small business getting a loan. The first part of the onboarding process is very efficient with a decision in principle taken quickly and often powered by credit bureau data in the background. But often later on in the application process, a lot of the data cannot be processed automatically, so somebody needs to manually verify and cross-check information from a lot of different sources such as open banking, payslips, credit bureaus, identity documents and so on.

This manual work requires back and forth with the customer, can lead to inconsistent decisions and exposes to regulatory risk. For an average mid-sized institution, the costs related to verifying information and related risk can easily amount to several millions.

This is where Sikoia comes in: we are a Customer Verification Platform that centralises data from a lot of different sources using the latest technology, standardise them to enable more consistent decision-making, and most importantly automatically generate insights.

Sikoia is used by companies across various sectors to streamline their onboarding and verification processes for both businesses and consumers.

‍Business Use Cases: Companies like VertoFX, Paramount Commerce, MassMutual, and Channel Capital use Sikoia for seamless international business onboarding and verification. With a single interface and contract, they can access services like company registry, credit bureau data, identity verification (IDV), and anti-money laundering (AML) checks across 20+ countries. These services can be integrated into their existing onboarding workflows or accessed through Sikoia’s ready-to-use Portal.

‍Consumer Use Cases: In the consumer sector, clients such as Mutual Vision (a loan origination platform serving 15+ building societies), One Mortgage System (a CRM platform for thousands of brokers), Green Mortgages (a mortgage intermediary), and Bank of Ceylon (UK subsidiary of a major South Asian bank) rely on Sikoia for automated consumer verification. This includes leveraging Sikoia’s AI-powered document insights to verify income, employment, affordability, and more.

Sikoia provides a comprehensive solution for both business and consumer verification needs, making it the go-to platform for financial institutions and intermediaries.
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Customers trust Sikoia because our enterprise SaaS platform meets the highest standards for information security, data protection, and business continuity. By working with large financial institutions and regulated service providers, we ensure that our platform satisfies the most stringent requirements.

Key features that inspire trust include:

‍Robust Infrastructure: Our APIs and Dashboard are built with auto-scaling, zone redundancy, and regular backups, ensuring platform resiliency, high availability, and uninterrupted service.

‍Regulatory Compliance: Sikoia is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as an Account Information Service Provider (AISP) under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (FRN: 942979) and as a credit reference provider (FRN: 942616).

‍Commitment to Security: We are in the final stages of obtaining ISO27001 certification, further reinforcing our commitment to the highest levels of data security and risk management.

This combination of regulatory compliance, platform reliability, and focus on security is why leading financial institutions and service providers place their trust in Sikoia.
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Yes, Sikoia offers product demos and Proof of Concepts for select solutions. Clients can book a customised product demo with Sikoia's experts here.

As an approved reseller of consumer and business credit data from market-leading providers including TransUnion and Creditsafe, Sikoia satisfies the strictest vendor requirements on information security, data protection, and business continuity commitments.

Sikoia is also authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as an Account Information Service Provider (AISP) under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (FRN: 942979) and as a credit reference provider (FRN: 942616).

Yes! Sikoia always provides comprehensive support regardless of how clients are using the platform – all customers have the reassurance of Sikoia's support SLA.

Our pricing structure is tailored to Volume with a minimum monthly spend of £499. Please reach out to Sikoia's sales team for detailed pricing information. They will be happy to provide a quote based on volumes and data requirements.

- Customer Evaluation Dashboard: Central hub to enrich verify your customer data
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- AI-Powered Document Processing: Automatically verify customer-supplied application documents and generate insights Income and
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- Employment Verification: Automated checks on payslips, tax, bank statements and/or open banking
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- Affordability Insights: Automated open banking and bank statements checks
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- AML, IDV and credit bureaus: Automatically enrich your customer data with our marketplace of providers, all through a single contract and platform

Sikoia's solutions works for both companies and private individuals.

Customer Dashboard can be accessible to use from Day 1 and readily available, integration through APIs generally take a bit longer depending on your internal processes.

Sikoia’s unified data dashboard is a web application built specifically for business users who wants to gather data on one or more companies or people in one place to take better business decision, without involving any engineers. In the dashboard, you can request a various form of data on both businesses and individual customers including, Company Registry Data, Credit Data, AML Data, Open Banking and Online Data.

Sikoia's platform is highly configurable. Clients can plug-and-play with Sikoia's global ecosystem of data providers, selecting the providers they need. Sikoia provides the most complete set of reliable and relevant data sources, customised to specific requirements, including PEPs/Sanctions, Credit Bureaus, Adverse Media, Fraud, IDV checks, Open banking, Company registries, AML, and Document Processing. Sikoia's clients can also use its APIs to integrate data and capabilities into their existing processes very precisely.

Yes, by using Sikoia’s powerful checklists feature, clients can effortlessly encode their internal business rules and seamlessly test them against the data in a case to determine if that case meets their criteria.

Yes, Sikoia's API can integrate with any application or site.

Sikoia collaborates with data providers in two main ways: as resellers or integrators. Here's how each model works:

1) Reseller Model:
- In this setup, Sikoia acts as a reseller for various data providers. This means that clients can access all of these providers' services through Sikoia under a single contract.
- By doing this, clients benefit from simplified terms and conditions offered by Sikoia, instead of needing separate agreements with each individual provider.
- Sikoia streamlines the procurement process, handling the relationships and negotiations with the data providers, making it easier for clients to integrate multiple data sources into their workflows.

2) Integrator Model:
- Sikoia integrates the data providers’ services into its platform or ecosystem, enabling seamless access to various data points or insights in one place.
- This allows clients to use data from multiple providers through Sikoia's infrastructure, which simplifies integration, management, and use of the data without dealing with multiple interfaces or platforms.

Overall, Sikoia provides a unified solution for clients to access a wide range of data providers, saving them the complexity of managing numerous contracts and integrations.

Sikoia’s AI-powered Document Processing solution provides cost-effective, automated insights from customer-supplied documents like bank statements, payslips, and tax returns. By combining this information with additional data sources, such as open banking, we deliver automatic verification of key details, including income, employment, affordability, and address verification. Our solution also identifies potential risk indicators, helping businesses streamline decision-making processes.

Download the product sheet here.

No, it simply comes down to the clients' needs.

Yes. Sikoia's Unified API is a RESTful JSON API supporting programmatic access to the platform. This allows clients' technical teams to create, request, review, and action data over an API, enabling them to automate and enhance their existing processes within the Sikoia ecosystem or even their own tools.

Sikoia’s solutions offer a comprehensive array of data to accelerate customer onboarding, reduce costs, and enhance customer experience while strengthening risk management.

Clients can access a wide range of data types through Sikoia, including company registries, company credit bureau information, consumer credit bureau details, and identity verification. Our platform also provides PEPs (Politically Exposed Persons) and sanctions checks, adverse media checks, open banking data, and automated document processing.

For more information on geographic coverage and exact data sources, please see our API documentation here.

Yes, Sikoia has been awarded ISO 27001 certification. ISO 27001 is a widely recognised, internationally accepted standard for information security and we have attained it across all Sikoia's services and products. An accredited independent auditor has assessed our processes and controls, and confirmed they align with the certification standard. British Assessment Bureau, an ISO accredited certification body, has certified our compliance with the ISO standard. Having ISO 27001 certification helps assure our merchants and their customers that we take information security management seriously.

Document verification involves various methods tailored to meet the specific needs of your business. Key financial documents often used include:

- Bank Statements: Crucial for verifying employment, net pay, affordability, and other financial indicators. While similar data can be accessed via Open Banking, it does not provide the comprehensive range of checks possible with bank statements, such as address verification.

- Payslips: Important for confirming consumer income and employment. Payslips can also assist in verifying additional information, such as addresses.

- Tax Statements: Documents like tax overviews or SA302s are used for applicants with more complex income profiles, providing a detailed view of their financial situation.

- Identity Documents: Frequently used in KYC (Know Your Customer) scenarios and can be verified digitally using biometric ID verification providers.
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- Utility Bills: Commonly submitted to verify an address.

Document Processing and Automated Verification transform document handling by automating the verification process and streamlining assessments. This approach involves extracting key data from various documents and converting it into a digital format, which accelerates the verification process significantly.

Automation offers a substantial boost in efficiency, completing tasks that were previously repetitive and time-consuming up to 10 times faster than manual methods. For example, while a human might spend over an hour reviewing a single application, automated systems can perform the same integrity checks in under a minute. This dramatic increase in speed enables the processing of a larger volume of applicants while maintaining rigorous compliance standards.

KYB and KYC processes serve different, yet critical, functions. While KYC is largely concerned with confirming the identity of individual clients through personal details and documentation, KYB takes a broader perspective, examining businesses that regulated firms transact with. Typically, KYB processes examine the business's structure, ownership, sentiment, reputation and other related aspects to gauge potential risks and ensure adherence to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules specific to businesses.

KYB checks are robust, drawing upon a wide array of information sources. Predominantly, these checks refer to the official government registries in the country where the business is established. To bolster these checks, additional resources like business registries, commercial databases, and public records may be utilised. Documents such as financial statements and annual reports, often found in the relevant company registry, may also come under review.

KYB checks are mandated by various laws and regulations aimed at countering money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, and other financial crimes. These can include Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter Financing of Terrorism (CFT) laws, along with sector-specific compliance stipulations. Notable examples include the European Union’s Anti-Money Laundering Directives (AMLD 4, 5 and 6), Singapore's Corruption, Drug Trafficking, and Other Serious Crimes Act 1992, Hong Kong's Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance, and the USA PATRIOT Act. These legal frameworks largely derive from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) Forty Recommendations, a global standard for combating money laundering and terrorism financing.

KYB compliance is crucial across many sectors, particularly those at greater risk of financial crime, such as money laundering. This includes financial institutions like banks, payment processors, and insurers. Other sectors like real estate, legal and accounting services, gaming, and virtual currency exchanges are also often required to carry out KYB checks. However, the specific obligations can vary, based on local laws and the assessed risks within each sector.