A New Era for KYC: Meet Celeris
How J.P. Morgan is paving the future of enterprise automation
By David White
For decades, Know Your Customer (KYC) has been synonymous with friction.
Yet after examining hundreds of thousands of onboarding requests across our firm, we came to a different conclusion:
KYC isn't fundamentally a paperwork problem. It's an information orchestration problem.
Weeks spent chasing documents, manually verifying data, and navigating disconnected handoffs between compliance, operations, and client teams are symptoms of a deeper challenge. Information exists, but it rarely exists where and when it is needed.
Emails move back and forth. Operations teams swivel between systems. Requests sit in queues waiting for the next handoff. Each step serves a purpose, but together they create a process defined as much by waiting as working.
At JPMC, that complexity plays out on an enormous scale. We receive 325,000+ KYC requests each year across 49 countries. For our teams, it has meant countless hours of coordinating data across people and systems. For our clients, it has often meant repeated requests for documents they've already provided, long stretches of silence, and little visibility into what happens in the interim.
Much of the information already exists. The challenge is getting the right information to the right place, validating and reconciling it along the way, and doing so without relying on a chain of human handoffs to keep the process moving.
For years, that coordination was accepted as part of the cost of KYC. AI lets us challenge that assumption and imagine a model where systems request, validate, reconcile, and share data directly. Work continues to move unless genuine ambiguity requires human judgement.
That is the idea behind Celeris, a name with Latin roots meaning swift and agile, and the beginning of a very different approach to KYC and enterprise automation.
Reimagining KYC with Celeris
Celeris provides a multi-agent orchestration layer that enables modular, scalable automation, including KYC-related data collection and document processing. It sources data, classifies and extracts information from incoming documents, and requests only what is needed from clients.
The result is shorter onboarding timelines, greater operational efficiency, and a stronger client experience. Internally, it reduces swivel-chair processing, minimizes queue-related delays, and eliminates many requests for information that already exists elsewhere in the process.
Rather than routing information through a chain of human touchpoints, purpose-built agents assume responsibility for tasks such as KYC renewals, identity verification, sanctions screening, beneficial ownership resolution, and document validation.
Celeris enables those agents to request, validate, reconcile, and escalate only when ambiguity truly exists. KYC timelines can move from days or weeks to a matter of moments, not by cutting corners, but by eliminating the latency of human-mediated coordination.
Users describe the task they need to accomplish, and the system determines the next steps. KYC officers have access to internal data and documents, along with visibility into workflow progress, agent activity, and process status across lines of business. The experience is conversational, allowing users to query, direct, and interact with agents naturally while maintaining visibility and control throughout the process.
As the platform expands, KYC data and documents can increasingly be reused across onboarding workflows, reducing duplicate requests and creating a more seamless experience across products and lines of business.
How Clients Experience Celeris Connect
The implications extend well beyond KYC. Celeris provides a foundation for regulated financial workflows, including monitoring, inquiry resolution, cross-institution data sharing, and other information-intensive processes.
Clients engaging with us on A2A capabilities are not simply addressing operational bottlenecks. They are helping define how AI-enabled financial services will operate in the years ahead.
Celeris Connect serves as a plug-and-play agent network that allows lines of business to coordinate workflows through a shared framework. Built on emerging A2A communication standards, it streamlines document requests, information exchange, and workflow execution.
Many forward-looking treasury clients are already exploring ways to reduce manual communication and document exchange through AI-enabled workflows. Yet even sophisticated organizations remain early in their agentic journey.
Clients do not need a mature agent ecosystem to begin realizing value. A shared document repository can provide a practical starting point while broader integrations are built. Celeris Connect can retrieve documents, classify content, extract relevant information, and translate it into reusable workflows. This allows clients to solve a real problem today while building toward more advanced agentic operating models.
The Future of Celeris and Agent-to-Agent Communication
Our team began with a simple challenge: KYC had become a weeks-long relay of emails, duplicated requests, and manual verification. By treating KYC as an information orchestration challenge rather than a paperwork exercise, we created a secure, permissioned, agentic approach that reduces cycle times while preserving the rigor regulators and risk stakeholders require.
This is far from the wild west of AI.
Human oversight remains central. Flagged discrepancies, elevated risk assessments, and exceptions continue to involve people. Agent activity is logged, permissioned, and scoped to specific responsibilities, creating a transparent and auditable record of decisions and actions.
Most importantly, Celeris is more than an efficiency initiative. It is a foundation for how AI-enabled financial services can operate across regulated workflows. The same capabilities for modernizing KYC create a path toward broader automation, stronger client experiences, and more effective collaboration without sacrificing control, transparency, or accountability.
KYC may have been where the journey began. The opportunity to rethink information orchestration across the enterprise is only just getting started.
