Every published figure for the cost of KYC is an average across firms that look nothing like yours, which makes it useless for a budget and worse than useless for a decision. Your own number is not hard to produce and it takes four inputs you already have. This page sets out the arithmetic and points at where the cost hides, which is almost never onboarding.
The four inputs
How many customers you take on a year at each risk rating. How many minutes a file takes to open at each rating. How often a file at each rating comes back for review, and what share of the opening time a review takes. And the cost of the hour of the person doing it. Those four give you an annual cost with no averages borrowed from anybody. The free checklist on this site does the arithmetic, and it also asks for the number of files with no recorded review date, which is the fifth input most firms have never gathered.
The cost is in the book, not the intake
Onboarding cost scales with new customers. Review cost scales with the whole book, which is larger and grows every year. A firm three years in is usually spending more on reviewing customers it already has than on taking on new ones, and it is usually budgeting as though the opposite were true. That single misreading is why review programmes are underfunded and why back books drift out of date.
Cost per customer is a ratio, and it moves
Dividing the annual figure by the number of files carried gives a cost per customer per year that is far more useful than a cost per onboarding, because it prices the thing you actually carry. Watch it over time rather than as a snapshot: it falls when the same team carries more files and rises when the mix shifts towards higher-risk customers, and both of those are decisions somebody is making whether or not anybody is measuring them.
Questions people ask about kyc cost
What does KYC cost per customer?
For your firm, the annual cost of opening and reviewing files divided by the files you carry. Any figure quoted without those inputs is somebody else's mix of customers and somebody else's hourly cost.
Why is the review cost so much higher than people expect?
Because it is a function of the whole book rather than of new business, and because higher-risk files come back more often. A small number of enhanced customers can outweigh a large number of standard ones.
Does software reduce KYC cost?
It reduces the coordination cost, which is the time spent finding out what was collected and whether a review is due. It does not reduce the judgement, and any product that claims to is describing a different job.