A systematic literature review of blockchain-based e-KYC systems

The know your customer (KYC) guidelines in financial services require that institutions make an effort to verify the identity, suitability, and assess risks involved while maintaining a business relationship. The procedures fit within the broader scope of any financial institution’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policy. Governments around the world have digitalised this process to make it more convenient and transparent by introducing the notion of e-KYC (Electronic KYC). e-KYC provides a flexibility for the users as they might even quickly complete the on-boarding process from the comfort of their homes. However, there are a few outstanding issues, such as the lack of any global standardisation, possible fraudulent activities during the e-KYC process and other privacy concerns, that must be addressed before its full benefits can be achieved. Recently, blockchain technology (or blockchain in short) has emerged as a foundational technology with possibilities to disrupt a wide range of application domains. Understandably, it is increasingly being investigated how blockchain can be a useful tool to address these outstanding issues. Towards this aim, a number of research works have emerged in the recent years. In this article, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) of these works using the PRISMA model in order to identify and critically analyse the existing researches at the intersection of e-KYC and blockchain. Based on our study we have also identified the limitations of the existing solutions and provided future directions.