Understand Easol's Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and risk form

What is the KYC and risk form?

Easol's KYC and Risk Form is a key component of our risk mitigation measures at Easol. As we process payments on your behalf, Easol is required to collect and periodically verify certain information for KYC, compliance, and risk management purposes. Amongst other things, we require this to continue making payouts. We've prepared this form to facilitate data sharing. If you run multiple experiences on Easol, you will need to complete this form for each unique entity attached to an Easol account.

How do I share this information securely?

We will treat all information shared as confidential and it will be used by the team on a strict need-to-know basis, with access restricted to only a few team members. We have shared a unique Typeform with the list of questions in the form and space where you can provide answers to each question. There are some questions that ask for an attachment/supplemental file. Any data uploaded will be treated in utmost confidence and will be used only for the needs described below.

Why do we need you to complete this form?

Easol has a responsibility to understand who our customers are and given the deferred-delivery nature of experience businesses, where a payment is made for an experience that won't happen until some time in the future, we need to understand any risk of an experience being sold and not operated. This helps us protect all of our creators, including you, and ensures we're building a platform that can continue to support you and your business into the future.

What do we do with this information?

Using information on your business entity, we run entity checks across KYC and AML databases. We do this to ensure we remain compliant with stakeholder requirements and industry regulations.

We also verify and store data like your business entity address and bank account information in our platform so that we can accept payments and ensure payouts only go to the right accounts.

It is our responsibility to understand for whom we are processing payments, so we use the information to conduct a risk assessment on your business. Because experiences are often delivered far into the future from when they're sold, there's a risk that they might not be operated. The questions we ask provide evidence that the business is sustainable and goods and services will be fulfilled. Without this information, Easol would have to hold back 50%-100% of your sales in reserve until the experience has been provided. We want to work with you to ensure that doesn't happen and we can pay out most of your sales on an ongoing bases.

Other platforms haven't asked me for this, why are you?

We recognise that not all platforms have the same data collection protocols, and many can assess or mitigate risk differently (some even holding back a significant portion of sales for months or until after the relevant experience has occurred). However, we believe that it is our responsibility to do our due diligence when it comes to understanding and mitigating risk, and would rather err on the side of caution than put our creators in a compromising position.

This is also a good thing! You benefit from Easol being more secure. Our hope is that requesting additional information gives you peace of mind that Easol takes risk seriously and is a trusted partner when it comes to managing your business.