Know your customer before they transact.

What KYC requires in Argentina

The Unidad de Información Financiera is the enforcement authority for Argentina's anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regime. It is the body that defines the specific obligations of each type of obligated party and oversees them.

Its requirements for customer onboarding are organized into three linked duties.

• Identify and know — obtain and verify the customer's identity before they transact, and understand the profile that justifies the transactions they are going to make.
• Document — keep the customer file with the evidence of how that identification was done, available to the supervisor for the period the law sets.
• Maintain and report — update that information throughout the relationship and report the suspicious transactions that arise from later monitoring.

What VU automates in KYC

VU covers the identification link, which is the one that produces the evidence on which the rest of the duty rests.

• Identity verification at sign-up — reading of the Argentine document, biometric matching of the face against the document and liveness detection at capture.
• Process orchestration — the order of the steps, retries, timeouts and what happens when a step does not complete.
• Trail of each step — what ran, with what result and when. It is what gets shown later when the supervisor asks how that customer came to be known.
• Reuse of the verified identity — the same identity checked at sign-up later serves to authenticate that person, without repeating the process or fragmenting the evidence.

And what VU does not do, which in KYC is half the work:

• It does not build the customer's transactional profile. Understanding which transactions are consistent with that person is the obligated party's analysis of its own business data.
• It does not classify the customer's risk or decide on their acceptance. The risk matrix and the decision to onboard are internal policy, and the law requires them of the obligated party, not of its provider.
• It does not assemble the regulatory customer file or define retention periods. VU produces evidence; what is retained, in what format and for how long is decided by compliance.
• It does not interpret whether a company is an obligated party. That reading is a legal one and comes before any product decision.
• It does not monitor later transactions. KYC does not end at sign-up, and that second half is AML.

Use cases in Argentina

Where this problem shows up in the real operation of the Argentine market.

• Banks and wallets that onboard through digital channels. Identification went from an employee looking at a document to a process that has to prove itself, and the customer file stopped being a folder and became a record of events.

• Virtual asset service providers. It is the newest category of obligated party and the one that arrives with no legacy process, so it builds its KYC from scratch while it grows.

• Companies covered by a single business line. They discover they are an obligated party because of one specific activity and have to set up a full regime with no prior compliance team.

• Customers onboarded years ago, with incomplete files. The obligation to keep information up to date collides with portfolios signed up when the standard of evidence was different.

• Notaries, insurers and capital market participants. They share the obligation with banks but not their scale or their budget, so the question is not what to buy but how much process is proportionate.