KYC Data Remediation: 2026 Guide
Banks don’t fail compliance reviews because they lack policies. They fail because their data is wrong. Customer records decay quietly: companies dissolve, directors change, ownership shifts, and addresses go stale.
When that happens, transaction monitoring flags the wrong entities, sanctions screening misses real risk, and regulatory reports lose credibility.
Data remediation is how banks reset the baseline. It is the process of identifying, correcting, and validating customer and counterparty data against authoritative sources, usually company registries.
In 2026, regulators no longer view remediation as optional or periodic. They expect banks to prove their data is accurate, current, and defensible at all times.
This article is for financial crime and senior compliance professionals looking to conduct a data remediation project.
What Is Data Remediation in KYC?
Know Your Customer (KYC) data remediation is the systematic process of identifying, correcting, and updating inaccurate or outdated customer information in a bank or obliged entity’s records.
The process works like this:
Banks extract their customer records.
Match them against authoritative sources (usually official company registries).
Update what's wrong or missing, including company addresses, registration status, beneficial ownership and PEP connections.
It is typically a point-in-time project, and its effectiveness is determined by the quality of the data you start with, the reliability of your external sources, and whether you build processes to maintain accuracy afterwards.
Why Is Data Remediation Important?
Poor data kills compliance programs. When customer information decays, your entire financial crime framework collapses.
Transaction monitoring alerts on the wrong people.
Sanctions screening misses sanctioned entities.
SARs arrive at regulators with useless narratives.
Regulators have shifted expectations. In 2026, they expect perpetual monitoring, not periodic reviews.
Recent Enforcement Trends: The 2026 Landscape
Regulators like the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) are increasingly penalising financial institutions for failing to keep customer data up-to-date and accurate:
Gatehouse Bank (2022): Relied on an outdated list of investors when screening the shareholders of a special purpose vehicle (SPV) in a high-risk jurisdiction, making them unable to see that multiple recent investors were PEPs. Fined for £1,584,100. Source
Ghana International Bank (2022): Failed to detect that a business client had ceased trading five years previously. This meant they failed to terminate their dormant account, an essential move to fight money laundering. Fined for £5,829,900. Source
ADM Investor Services International (2023): Relied on an outdated database of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), rendering their financial crime team unable to effectively assess the risk level of customers. Fined for £6,470,600. Source
What this means: In 2026, regulators are moving from periodic reviews to real-time data triggers. Increasingly, the FCA is concerned with the freshness and reliability of a firm’s data – not merely its AML frameworks.
How Does the KYC Data Remediation Process Work?
At Kyckr, the data remediation process follows a standard template:
Step 1: Initial Assessment.
Kyckr's specialist remediation team will discuss your unique project requirements before giving a clear delivery plan and quotation.
Step 2: Send Your Files.
Kyckr receives your records. Most banks send our remediation specialists their customer records in an Excel spreadsheet.
Step 3: Record Matching.
Kyckr automatically searches the relevant company registries to match customer records to live registrations.
Step 4: Record Retrieval
When a match is found, Kyckr automatically retrieves live company profiles, including registration details, and shareholder data (where filed), all presented in a structured form for easy integration with KYB workflows and time-stamped at the time and date of retrieval.
Step 5: Receive Report.
At the end of the data remediation process, you receive a report detailing the match rate, country splits and deficiencies in customer recording. Sometimes, at the registry, some companies might not have data at the registry – validate it at the registry.
How long it takes: Kyckr can remediate 10,000 company profiles in 17 days.
What Are the Challenges of Data Remediation Projects?
According to Laura O’Mahony, Product Manager at Kyckr, there are usually two challenges in data remediation projects: data quality issues and registry limitations.
1. Data Quality
During data remediation projects, financial crime teams and KYB professionals provide the remediator with low-quality customer data, significantly increasing the time it takes for remediators to do their job.
This includes:
Spelling mistakes.
Abbreviations.
Incorrectly filled data fields.
Why this matters: In a data remediation project, KYB data providers use automated software to match customer data with records from official registries.
Example: Paragon, a UK-based private limited company, is listed in the name field of an internal company data Excel spreadsheet as “Paragon ltd”.
2. Registry Limitations
Laura said, “With every data remediation project, you’re at the mercy of the registries.” She cited 2 critical issues:
Data Type: Company registries don’t provide the same depth or breadth of company data – for example, many don’t provide data on sole traders – which might cause a higher match rate failure, depending on the type of customers.
API Speed: Not all company registries have API connections, which increases the time it takes to match customer data with official company records.
What this means: The length of a remediation project is often determined by the corporate registries – whether they're manual or API-first, transparent, or closed. There are few things more frustrating in KYB than being blocked by a manual registry like the British Virgin Islands.
Example: 72% of a bank’s customers are registered in Ireland. However, 12% are based in the British Virgin Islands – a manual company registry without a searchable online database or API.
KYC Data Remediation Strategy Checklist
If you want to speed up your data remediation project, start by ensuring the data is clean, normalised and correctly structured:
The bare minimum: Ensure every entity has a company name, number, registration date, status and company activity code.
Know where your clients are: Ensure each entity listed has a country ISO code. Be aware, too, that the best data remediation projects must be at the mercy of the registries holding your customers’ information.
Ensure data fields are filled correctly: This means the name should match the “name” field, for example. Otherwise, the remediators will have to tidy the data.
Map your customer base by jurisdiction complexity. Prioritise remediation for high-risk jurisdictions where manual registry checks could delay customer reviews by 2-3 weeks during regulatory scrutiny.
As Laura said, “Remediation projects are only as good as the data that they’re fed.”
What to Do After the Data Remediation Project Is Complete
You remediate 30,000 customers in Q1. By Q2, companies have new directors, changed addresses, been acquired, or dissolved. Your data is already stale again.
In other words, the report shows you what was true on the day you ran it. It doesn't keep you compliant.
1. Immediate Action Items
The report will show deficiencies: customers you couldn't match, registries with no data, and conflicts between sources. These become action items.
Customers with no registry match: Relationship manager outreach for updated incorporation documents.
Registries with gaps: Consider secondary data sources or enhanced due diligence requirements for those jurisdictions.
Systematic data quality issues: Fix upstream processes so you don't recreate the same problems.
If you don't action these findings, you've wasted the money.
2. Institute Ongoing Refresh Cycles
Run risk-weighted continuous monitoring – a core mechanism of perpetual KYC.
High-risk customers: Quarterly checks against registry data.
Medium-risk: Annually.
Low risk: Every three years or at trigger events (large transactions, relationship manager flags, adverse media).
What this requires: API access to registries, not batch processing. And it requires integration with your KYC refresh workflow, not a separate remediation project.
3. Regulatory Reporting
When the FCA asks about your AML controls, you need to show:
When you last remediated customer data.
What percentage of your book is current.
How you maintain data quality.
What your escalation process is for data conflicts.
The remediation report becomes evidence in your regulatory file. But only if you can demonstrate it led to actual improvements in your control environment.
Automated Data Remediation Powered by Live Official Records
Kyckr offers a batch remediation service that automatically matches your existing customer data to live, official records, then updates it with live company profiles from 300+ registers – primary source company data that reduces false positives and provides the most audit-proof information available.