Every KYC integration I've seen treats the vendor decision as the hard part. It isn't. The hard part is what happens when the vendor says "maybe".
Automated verification gives you three outcomes, not two: pass, fail, and needs a human. That third bucket is where the system actually lives. On a fiat-to-crypto onramp I built, the review queue was a first-class service — not a spreadsheet, not an admin page bolted on at the end.
Because a queue has properties nobody plans for. A user sits in limbo with money already in flight. Two moderators open the same case. Someone approves an applicant whose documents expired while they waited. A retry from the vendor arrives after a human already decided, and now you have two verdicts for one identity.
So I design the moderation path the way I'd design a payment path: explicit states, one owner per case, decisions written as immutable events rather than a status column someone overwrites. The audit trail isn't a compliance checkbox — it's the only way to answer "why is this account open" six months later.
What I'd tell anyone starting: build the human-review flow in the first sprint, not the last. It determines your onboarding latency more than the vendor's SLA does.
If you run KYC in production — what's your actual bottleneck: vendor response time, or the queue behind it?