At our recent Future Identity Festival, we sat down with Laura Spiekerman, President & Co-Founder at Alloy, a KYC platform for financial institutions and fintechs, to discuss all things identity verification and KYC.
Laura’ perfectly captured how identity and risk are being redefined in financial services. Her central message is that this is no longer a simple trade-off between “fast” and “safe” – institutions now have to do both at once, in real time, across multiple markets.
She describes speed versus safety as a genuine balancing act. Customers expect to do everything from their phones in minutes, while regulators demand tighter controls and clearer evidence that firms understand and manage customer risk. That is why she stresses dynamic, real-time customer risk assessment: risk has to be evaluated continuously as people interact with products, not just when they first sign up. Her example of IG Group underlines this reality. High-growth firms need to onboard quickly but still show regulators that they are controlling fraud and losses, which pushes them toward more sophisticated decisioning infrastructure in the background.
Laura also highlights how geographic expansion, especially in the UK and Europe, compounds the challenge. Many providers are “born global,” entering multiple countries from day one, which means grappling with different languages, cultures, and regulatory regimes all at once. The hard part is not just connecting to data, but connecting to the right local data sources that satisfy each jurisdiction’s standards. She portrays this as a puzzle that financial institutions have to solve piece by piece, often leaning on platforms that can orchestrate those local data connections and rules at scale.
Her final point focusses on the shift from periodic to perpetual KYC and KYB. Instead of treating KYC as a one-off onboarding event (with occasional refreshes), leading UK and European institutions are moving toward ongoing monitoring throughout the customer lifecycle. That brings obvious benefits for financial crime prevention, but she ties it directly to better customer experience too: if you understand customer behavior continuously, you can be proactive rather than reactive, tailoring offers and interventions instead of repeatedly asking for the same information.
Take a look at the video below to hear her thoughts in more depth.
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