Launched in 2014, the KYC utility currently offers jurisdictional coverage in the US, UK and Australia, sharing data on 169,000 entities and 350,000 documents.

Alongside Standard Chartered, existing kyc.com users Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and UBS have signalled their intent to use the service to support their due diligence in the region.

David Deane, managing director of client and data services at Deutsche Bank says: "We actively support the use of KYC utilities and have been investing in the development of the kyc.com service as a founding design partner since its inception. Now that the service has been developed, we want to encourage market adoption. Deutsche Bank is inviting customers to subscribe to this service and contribute their KYC documentation and data to kyc.com".

So far, over 1500 buyside firms and corporations, representing 37,000 legal entities are using the portal to supply KYC documentation to their banking partners.

The move into Asia comes on the back of recent survey commissioned by kyc.com which revealed that 63% of financial institutions across Asia believe varying KYC standards across the region exacerbate regulatory risk. When conducting due diligence checks on customers, 58% surveyed have either terminated existing customers or refused new customers given due diligence concerns.

“One of the biggest challenges to conducting KYC in Asia is the regional variation for cross border compliance, which adds a layer of complexity to managing our customer relationships,” says David Fleet, managing director of client onboarding and management, Standard Chartered. “For us it’s about establishing best practice and mutualising efforts to remove some of the regional anomalies. Kyc.com supports this and provides a more cost effective way to conduct our business.”