Why We Need Pre-KYC: Reducing Cost and Protecting Privacy with One Product

Last week, Self introduced Pre-KYC, a first-of-its-kind infrastructure layer built to cut billions in avoidable KYC (Know Your Customer) costs while preserving user information until genuinely required.

Most public data estimates KYC cost between six and eight figures depending on a company’s scope and scale: already a massive cost for a business of any size. However, the number is incomplete. 

Every applicant in a regulated onboarding funnel triggers two cost centers. 

The KYC vendor invoice: document upload, selfie, liveness, sanctions check, and more. 

The manual-review team that picks up the cases the automated pipeline can't confidently close.

Many of those rejected cases failed for reasons that could have been answered with a simple yes or no, like sanctions status, age requirement, or country of residence. Instead, the organization wastes funds on a failed KYC check, and the user has already uploaded private information that will be stored for years to come. 

This process has long been recognized as wasteful and inefficient, the path to resolving this has been less clear. 

This is why Self introduced Pre-KYC. 

Users follow the privacy-first verification process, registering with Self (if they haven’t already) and generating a proof to verify their eligibility. For businesses, this means slashing waste by adding a simple pre-screening to only trigger KYC for users that have proven early eligibility. 

With privacy-first infrastructure and cutting edge cryptography, Self is serving 15M+ users and growing. Now through Pre-KYC, the same battle-tested infrastructure is available for institutions to cut their operational costs while bringing stronger user privacy to every applicant.

Privacy by Design

Self generates proofs on the user's device using their government-issued biometric ID. The output is a zero-knowledge proof that confirms a specific claim (that a user is over 18, or not from a restricted country) without transmitting the underlying data to anyone. Your servers receive cryptographic confirmation and nothing more. The user's personal data stays on their device, and your liability for rejected applicants drops to zero.

This transforms traditional KYC, where collecting and storing personal data is a prerequisite to screening, to only collecting information when absolutely necessary. 

Get early access to Pre-KYC

Reach out to prekyc@self.xyz or explore more here.