Client Due Diligence
Client due diligence (KYC)
that holds up.
Regulated firms across Africa carry statutory duties to identify and verify the clients they act for. Africa Documents gives you the evidence layer — verified identity documents, credential checks on the professionals who signed them, and a tamper-evident record of every access.
CDD and KYC are not quite the same thing
Customer due diligence — CDD, or client due diligence in legal practice — is the full obligation set out in FATF standards and enacted across African AML regimes: identify the client, verify that identity from reliable evidence, understand the purpose of the relationship, assess risk, and keep the information current for as long as the relationship lasts.
KYC, as most people use it, is the identity verification step inside that obligation. It is the part where evidence is collected, checked, and retained — and it is the part where most firms are exposed, because the evidence sits in photocopies, shared drives, and email attachments that no one can later prove were unaltered.
That evidence layer is what Africa Documents is built for.
If you are a regulated firm
Lawyers, accountants, and company secretaries are designated non-financial businesses and professions under FATF standards. The obligation is yours, the risk decisions are yours, and your money laundering reporting officer remains accountable for them. What we provide is the instrumentation.
- Evidence that is verifiably unaltered. Identity documents are held with a cryptographic seal and a trusted timestamp, so a copy produced two years from now can be shown to be the copy you collected on the day.
- Verified copies, not photocopies. A document countersigned on the platform carries the credentials of the professional who reviewed it, checked against their practising certificate at the time of signing.
- An access record you can hand to an inspector. Every read of a client’s identity evidence is written to an append-only ledger — who accessed it, when, and in what capacity. That includes access by our own staff.
- Retention that matches your regime, not ours. Evidence collected for due diligence is retained on the schedule your AML legislation requires, independently of how long the underlying document is held for other purposes.
If you are the business being asked
Every bank, supplier, and counterparty asks for the same certified copies of the same documents, and each one asks separately. Companies trading across African markets do this several times a year, in several countries, with couriers and certification fees each time.
On Africa Documents your incorporation papers, director identification, and beneficial ownership records are verified once and held under your control. You grant time-bound access to whoever needs to see them, and you revoke it when the relationship ends. Submit once, not once per counterparty.
Beneficial ownership
Identifying the natural persons behind a corporate client is the part of due diligence firms most often get wrong, and the part registries have moved fastest on. In Botswana, the Companies Act requires beneficial ownership information to be filed and kept current, with a ten percent threshold and a short window for reporting changes.
Africa Documents holds declared ownership information alongside the documents that evidence it, so what a client tells you and what they filed can be compared rather than assumed.
What we do and what we do not
We are deliberate about this, because compliance software that overstates itself creates the exact risk it claims to reduce.
We provide — document custody, professional verification, credential checking, identity evidence retention, and a tamper-evident access ledger across our active markets.
We do not — make risk determinations, file suspicious transaction reports, or discharge any part of your obligation on your behalf. Sanctions and politically exposed person screening are not part of the platform today. Your MLRO decides; we make the decision evidenced.
Know your obligations by market
Due diligence duties differ by jurisdiction, and so do the deadlines attached to them. We publish plain-language guides to the AML and due diligence obligations facing legal and accounting practices in each market we operate in.
Start with the evidence
Due diligence is only as strong as the records behind it. Hold them properly, and everything downstream — onboarding, review, inspection — gets easier to defend.