KYC, or Know Your Customer, has been a part of banking and telecom lexicon for many years in India. But it was only towards the end of 2016 that it started to shed its earlier skin of being just a simple regulatory requirement. And to grow into its new skin as a maker or breaker of business fortunes.
The first indication came on 1 December 2016, when Reliance Jio, the latest entrant into India’s crowded and ultra-competitive mobile telephony space, announced it had signed up 50 million new customers in just 83 days. That would be record-worthy growth for any new app or internet service, but here, Jio was a telecom operator which was signing up people physically in a large country like India.