Facilitating foreign investment into UK SME’s: dramatically speeding up the FCA KYC/AML and investment execution processes through innovative technologies.

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Building upon recent deregulation and the rapid growth in wealthy middle-class investors in South East Asia, Zoyo Technologies are developing the first multi-jurisdictional trading platform to enable High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) from India and China to invest in UK-listed companies for the first time - opening a £40bn investor market for UK SMEs to tap into for investment and funding.The project is the result of a number of key market trends including the rapid growth in retail investors in India and China; loosening of restrictions on foreign investments and a strong desire to diversify their portfolios - particularly with British companies. Currently this market is chronically under-served with all traditional financial institutions, banks and brokerages focusing on larger, fund transactions - rather than individual investors and investments.This is in part due to the high levels of due diligence required on each investor per transaction under established FCA Know Your Customer (KYC), Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. Whilst a vital part of regulatory protection, the process itself in terms of collecting information, validating and notarising documentation and cross-referencing this against national and international datasets is highly time consuming, involves a large amount of paper documentation and needs expensive, labour-intensive expertise just to confirm an identity. The result is that this process can take 3 weeks+ to complete, by which time conditions may have changed and investors' appetite waned. Additional continuous KYC re-certification is a regulatory requirement across all jurisdictions (best practice 6 monthly) and is currently subject to the same rigour, process and cost of initial onboarding. This, coupled with wider regulatory complexity, has meant no-one has developed a trading platform to enable UK companies to tap into these investors.We intend to address these issues and open up this market through the development of a multi-jurisdictional trading platform and a world-leading onboarding process that utilises biometric technology, AI augmented background checks, Optical Character Recognition of ID documentation, and physical liveness and likeness checking to ensure both new customer and ongoing KYC compliance checks, regulatory reporting and investing can be done as seamlessly as possible.