KYCGUY.COM: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the FinCrime Dream.

My name is David R. McCurdie. Some people call me the KYC Guy and I'll tell you right now that I did not choose this and I did not ask for it and somewhere around year fourteen I stopped fighting it because fighting it was taking up time I needed for other things, namely: reading the Articles and By-Laws of Bahamian shell companies by lamplight wondering how the hell we ever got here.

We got here. That's the point. We got here and here is where we are.

I used to play my songs in a rock 'n' roll band to the wilde-eyed, beer-drunk revellers of the Glasgow night. This was before I understood what the world actually runs on, which is not music and not love and certainly not the benevolent goodwill captains of industry!

KYC found me. Or I found it. The distinction stopped mattering somewhere over the North Sea on a flight back from Copenhagen annotating a customer lifecycle journey on a napkin that the woman next to me clearly found intriguing enough to ask me about and keep me from my work.

Nearly two decades. That's what we're talking about. Twenty years of due diligence on corporate structures so Byzantine they would have made Kafka weep. Twenty years of case narratives — and I mean this — that carried more raw feeling than anything I ever forced through a Vox amp. Twenty years of opinions about beneficial ownership registers delivered, with genuine affection, to anyone within earshot in the bodegas, beer halls and luncheon spots of the City of London and, of course, Copenhagen.

You might call it evangelising. I call it surviving.

I have toiled at the coalface at Saxo Bank, Nordea, BNY Mello, SVB and others who’ll remain in the footnotes. I have lived in vendorville, that strange fluorescent neighbourhood where the hoi polloi with their big picture dreams of automation and perpetual this or hands-free that live. Where everyone has a slide deck and a dream and, occasionally a product to sell. I’ve been at the sharp end of RegTech, which is where the real people are, the ones who (still) believe that technology and trusted data can fix this thing, who haven't yet had the belief beaten out of them by legacy tech, procurement cycles, budget constraints and internal politics that’d make Peter Mandelson blush.

I guess I know where the bodies are buried. I say this metaphorically. I think.

What the hell is kycguy.com?

It is not a brand. It is not a content strategy. It is not the output of a focus group where someone writes ‘AUTHENTICITY’ on a whiteboard in faded red pen and everyone nodded.

It’s only me. Un-filtered, un-corporatised (— is that a word? it is now) and driving fast without a seatbelt. Coming on twenty bloody years of war wounds, but the firm and unshakeable belief that this stuff matters — that financial crime compliance is not and never has been box-ticking. It is the difference between a functioning society and one that has been hollowed out by people who knew exactly how to exploit the gaps we leave open. The guys that are not bound by the rules we are. The ones who don’t have the constraints on them as we faithful, (mostly) law-abiding taxpayers have.

There are pretenders in this space. Everywhere, the dilettantes with their newsletters, their approved, right-on stock photos on bland slides, LinkedIn slop and thought leadership that has never once led anywhere near an authentic, lived experience or thought.

This is not that.

No punches pulled. This is my humble guarantee to you and to myself. Did I know any other way, really?

Watch. Conversations with the people who actually know (and do) things — practitioners, proper experts, the oddvendor worthy of coming in here without their talking points to just…talk. I’ll try to make sure they’re all worth your time. If you’ve read this far, then you’ve earned it.

Read. Written by me. A human. With a pen — metaphorically speaking, it's a keyboard, but the sentiment is analogue. Not generated. Not optimised. Neither pasteurised, nor homogenised or sanitised. On KYC, on financial crime, on whatever's burning on any given Tuesday.

The Corner Booth. The one at the back. Away from the windows. You slide in and put your hat on the formica table, tell me what's going on — your version, what’s bothering you — and we figure out what to do. I talk daily with vendors, practitioners, consultants and yes, even recruiters. Nearly twenty years in this business means I have seen this movie a good few times already. I know the actors, the great pretenders and the genuine good guys and girls.

The industry has come a long way since I was punching data off paper docs in a room of grey carpet tiles and terrible vending machine coffee in plastic cups.

There is still, let me be absolutely clear about this, an obscene amount of work to do.

This is where I do some of mine.

Take a number. Wait ‘til it’s called. The KYC Guy is taking appointments.