KYC Cost Calculator
Work out what a single customer onboarding actually costs you today — analyst time, screening data, rework on exception cases — and what changes when the routine cases go straight through.
Your onboarding numbers
Updates liveLabour is costed at the fully loaded hourly rate you entered. Screening and data cost is held constant across both scenarios, because you still screen every customer — automation changes who touches the file, not whether the check runs.
What actually makes KYC expensive
Most firms underestimate their cost per onboarding because they count the obvious line item — the screening subscription — and ignore the one that dominates the total. In a manual or semi-manual process, analyst time is usually seventy to ninety per cent of the cost of onboarding a customer, and the largest single contributor to that time is not the check itself but the waiting, chasing and re-keying around it.
The four costs in every onboarding
- Analyst handling time. Reviewing documents, entering data into the core system, reading screening output, discounting false positives, writing the rationale. This is the number most worth attacking.
- Data and screening. Identity verification, document authentication, sanctions, PEP and adverse media lookups, corporate registry pulls. Usually a fixed per-case cost you cannot remove, only negotiate.
- Exception handling. The cases that need enhanced due diligence, a second document, a UBO chain unwrapped by hand or a compliance escalation. A small share of cases absorbing a large share of the effort.
- Rework and abandonment. Files reopened because a document expired mid-process, data was re-keyed incorrectly, or the customer walked away and came back. Rarely measured, always material.
Why the exception rate matters more than the average
Move the exception slider in the calculator and watch the annual figure move disproportionately. If a standard case takes thirty-five minutes and an exception case takes another ninety on top, then a fifth of your volume is consuming close to half your analyst capacity. That is why reducing average handling time across the board is usually less valuable than removing the causes of exceptions: incomplete document capture at the front end, weak false-positive management in screening, and manual reconstruction of corporate ownership structures.
Where automation actually changes the number
Automation does not make screening free. It changes who touches the file. A clean retail case with an authenticated document, a passed liveness check, a clear screening result and a low risk score does not need an analyst at all — it needs an analyst to be available for the case that does. That is what straight-through processing means in practice, and it is why the calculator models a residual review cost on automated cases rather than assuming they cost nothing.
The costs that never make it into the model
Cost per onboarding is the easiest number to defend in a business case, but it is rarely the largest number on the table.
Abandonment
Applicants who start onboarding and never finish are pure lost revenue. Multi-day, document-heavy processes lose a meaningful share of the funnel before activation, and that loss usually dwarfs the analyst cost of the cases that do complete.
Time to revenue
Every day between application and activation is a day the customer is not transacting. For lending, payments and fund subscription flows this delay has a direct, measurable carrying cost.
Remediation
Files closed with a gap have to be reopened later, at scale, under a deadline. A back-book remediation exercise typically costs several times what it would have cost to onboard correctly the first time.
About KYC costs
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Cut the cost per onboarding, not the standard of the check
Book a 30-minute demo and see a clean case go straight through while an exception case routes to review — with the same audit trail behind both.
