Know your customer

Time of India

24-04-2025

Amit Kumar was trained as a Mechanical Engineer with specialization in thermal engineering from the University of Roorkee (now Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee) where he was awarded the University Gold Medal. Post his graduation, he decided to pursue a career in renewable energy, a novelty in the early eighties. He had retired from TERI in July 2021 whereas Senior Director, Social Transformation, was responsible for initiatives focusing on energy access, holistic rural development, and community engagement. There he had also led research activities in the fields of renewable energy and resource-efficient process technology applications. As Dean (Distance & Short-Term Education), TERI University between 2014 and 2016, he was responsible for the development and outreach of the University's online courses, management & faculty development programmes, and skill enhancement initiatives. LESS ... MORE
Gone are the days when you visited your bank's branch a few times and you were known to the guard at the entry, its teller, and maybe the branch manager too. Same applied to other establishments you were dealing with. But then those were different times, the uncomplicated ones. Who knew at that time that very soon simplicity was going to be out of fashion.
Somewhere around the middle of Generation Z period the Reserve Bank of India mandated KYC – Know Your Customer. That was then. Today, KYC has become so ubiquitous that it seems to be raison d'être – very purpose – for our existence. So intimately every establishment worth its name wants to KYC; know us, the customers, that a Victorian prude would have taken umbrage.
But as they say, there are customers and then there are customers. Through KYC, financial institutions are able to sift the lessor mortals, ops, the ordinary customers -`Your Ordinary Customers' (YOC) from the more valuable ones, called `Your Valuable Customers' (YVC). As a process, KYC results in YOCs and YVCs. While all the norms and practices apply to YOCs (the ordinary ones), there appears to be preferential set of rules for YVCs (the valuable ones). For instance, while even a marginal loan can only be disbursed to a YOC upon presentation of the required delivery/sale documents; for select YVC their promises – and persona – alone may suffice.
Some recent episodes tend to verify this hypothesis. And don't be fooled by that pop-up politely requesting you to revalidate your KYC, it is that gatekeeper who controls your access to what you wanted desperately but now cannot.
So all pervasive it has become that an ordinary citizen cannot access any service without undergoing through the rigmarole of KYC. But haven't online processes have made completing KYC in a jiffy? Welcome YOCs to illusory world called `customer support' populated by AI-driven chatbots or bots like personnel, both lacking empathy and solutions to your problem. Amidst all this, a WhatsApp number is flashed as a magic wand.
Interestingly, while there is so much of hoo-ha around KYC, the same customer has no recourse to 'Know' her service providers/financial institutions/other such establishments. A customer has no way to carry out due-diligence to assess the risk profile of entering in to a service or transactional arrangement with that entity `beforehand'. And once you have entered in to a relationship, it becomes a fait accompli: now negotiate that torturous maze of fast-disappearing customer support that every `customer-centric' or `customer-first' establishment tom toms.
A positive outcome of course is that such encounters enable you to develop unlimited patience and the art of maintaining mental balance under extreme conditions. I have to stop now and rush outside, my newspaper vendor is insisting on the weekly KYC before delivering my newspapers!
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Views expressed above are the author's own.