How bol is building a trusted marketplace through customer due diligence
0.0min
onboarding time, down from 0 days
0%
of cases first-time right, no follow-ups
0/100
partner effort score on bol's onboarding survey
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Trust is fundamental to how bol operates its marketplace. Every day, millions of customers rely on bol to connect them with partners offering products and services across the Netherlands and Belgium. Maintaining that trust requires more than complying with regulations. It also means ensuring partner quality, protecting customers, and creating the conditions for sustainable growth of the marketplace.
As bol's partner ecosystem expanded, the company recognized the need to further professionalize customer due diligence. Together with Duna, bol built a scalable, risk-based approach that strengthens marketplace trust while making onboarding and verification easier for legitimate partners.
Bol is a Dutch e-commerce marketplace with approximately 43,000 partners selling to consumers across the Netherlands and Belgium. Its customer due diligence (CDD) function assesses every selling partner against a risk-based policy that varies by country, business type and risk level. By combining automated verification, sanctions screening, watchlist checks and expert review, bol aims to maintain a trusted marketplace for customers and partners alike.
Today, the process is supported by Duna's platform, where analysts review cases in an average of 5.4 minutes and partners spend an average of 12.2 minutes actively completing onboarding requirements.
How customer due diligence became a strategic priority
Bol's customer due diligence journey started with a simple ambition: to maintain and strengthen trust in the marketplace.
As bol continued to grow, maintaining high standards for partner quality became increasingly important. Customers need to be able to trust the partners they buy from and the products offered on the platform. At the same time, bol wanted to support its growing partner ecosystem by making it easier for legitimate businesses to start selling.
Customer due diligence therefore became more than a compliance activity. It became an important capability for protecting customers, safeguarding marketplace integrity, maintaining partner quality, enabling sustainable growth and helping legitimate partners get started on the platform more quickly.
Together with Duna, bol designed a risk-based onboarding and verification process that strengthens trust while minimizing unnecessary friction for partners. The goal was not simply to verify more partners, but to create a process that is secure, efficient and partner-friendly.
Improvements realized by bol and Duna
In the past a paper activation code was sent in the post. Letters could take two weeks to arrive, and partners often called asking where their code was. Bol wanted to remove the two-week wait for an activation code and make it easier for legitimate partners to start selling, while at the same time strengthening its understanding of who was operating on the platform.
"When we started with CDD, it was driven by an internal ambition: to elevate and maintain our reputation as a trusted platform." Josje Fiolet, Head of CDD, Bol
The request for proposal (RFP) asked for customer due diligence built around Know Your Business (KYB) rather than retrofitted Know Your Customer (KYC), with an onboarding that could change by client type, country, and risk. It also asked for a vendor that knew the business side and treated onboarding as a commercial process. Most RFP vendors offered the verification step alone and expected bol to build the rest.
Together, bol and Duna designed and implemented a customer due diligence platform that supports the full lifecycle, from onboarding and case management to ongoing monitoring. Combining bol's knowledge of marketplace risks and partner behavior with Duna's technology and onboarding expertise resulted in a solution that balances trust, compliance and conversion.
Duna offers the complete infrastructure. Duna led with how the process actually works, what conversion looks like, and what a commercial company at bol's scale needs from the platform itself.
"Duna knows the markets, and they are genuinely enthusiastic about the problem space. The Duna team is interested in learning what we need, but they also challenge us and bring new perspectives. That is exactly what we needed as a company building CDD from scratch." Josje Fiolet, Head of CDD, bol
How 77% of partner cases close on first review
Bol's CDD department now runs with a dedicated-analyst team. The team reviews every partner who signs up, against policy bol's CDD team configures upstream
Each case file holds the entity, the people behind it, the screenings, the watchlist hits, and the prior decision history in one view.
"We have done more than 20,000 screenings on Duna at speed, because we can see everything in one overview, without pulling sources from multiple systems." Evelien Mols, Project Lead, CDD, Bol
Duna queries the relevant registries and connected data sources before the partner sees a question, then asks each partner only for the evidence the case still needs. By the time an analyst opens the case, the file already holds what the decision requires. Today, active partner time on a new onboarding averages 12.2 minutes.
Partners rate the experience 83 out of 100
The 14-day wait is gone. New partners walk the onboarding once and rate the experience 83 out of 100 on bol's post-onboarding survey.
As regulations, business structures and risk profiles evolve, bol periodically verifies whether partner information is still accurate and complete. That is why bol is also reverifying around 40,000 existing partners on Duna, with each partner spending an average of 11 minutes of active time per case. The partners who do not submit are mostly inactive accounts that no longer trade on the platform; bol offboards them.
Overview of the numbers, from bol’s dashboard:
12.2 minutes of active partner time per onboarding, down from the 14-day wait in the old process.
77% first-time right: partners finish onboarding with no follow-ups.
83/100 partner effort score on bol's post-onboarding survey.
“77% of cases close first-time right with no follow-up. For a CDD team, that is a quality signal. It tells us the policy is doing the work upstream, and the team can focus their judgement where it matters.” Josje Fiolet, Head of CDD, Bol
What started as an internal ambition has evolved into a joint effort between bol and Duna to strengthen marketplace trust at scale. By combining technology, risk-based controls and a partner-friendly experience, bol can help legitimate partners start faster, maintain high standards of partner quality, protect customers and support the sustainable growth of its marketplace.
About Duna
Duna is an AI-native compliance infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and marketplaces. Compliance teams write their policy in plain requirements; Duna's agents translate it into logic, source the evidence and apply it to every case, so decisions are consistent, explainable and current as regulations change. Duna is headquartered in Amsterdam and backed by Index Ventures and CapitalG. Customers include Plaid, Brand New Day, Moss and Bol.
See how Duna helps marketplaces onboard legitimate partners faster, with risk-based due diligence behind every decision. Get in touch.
Trust is fundamental to how bol operates its marketplace. Every day, millions of customers rely on bol to connect them with partners offering products and services across the Netherlands and Belgium. Maintaining that trust requires more than complying with regulations. It also means ensuring partner quality, protecting customers, and creating the conditions for sustainable growth of the marketplace.
As bol's partner ecosystem expanded, the company recognized the need to further professionalize customer due diligence. Together with Duna, bol built a scalable, risk-based approach that strengthens marketplace trust while making onboarding and verification easier for legitimate partners.
Bol is a Dutch e-commerce marketplace with approximately 43,000 partners selling to consumers across the Netherlands and Belgium. Its customer due diligence (CDD) function assesses every selling partner against a risk-based policy that varies by country, business type and risk level. By combining automated verification, sanctions screening, watchlist checks and expert review, bol aims to maintain a trusted marketplace for customers and partners alike.
Today, the process is supported by Duna's platform, where analysts review cases in an average of 5.4 minutes and partners spend an average of 12.2 minutes actively completing onboarding requirements.
How customer due diligence became a strategic priority
Bol's customer due diligence journey started with a simple ambition: to maintain and strengthen trust in the marketplace.
As bol continued to grow, maintaining high standards for partner quality became increasingly important. Customers need to be able to trust the partners they buy from and the products offered on the platform. At the same time, bol wanted to support its growing partner ecosystem by making it easier for legitimate businesses to start selling.
Customer due diligence therefore became more than a compliance activity. It became an important capability for protecting customers, safeguarding marketplace integrity, maintaining partner quality, enabling sustainable growth and helping legitimate partners get started on the platform more quickly.
Together with Duna, bol designed a risk-based onboarding and verification process that strengthens trust while minimizing unnecessary friction for partners. The goal was not simply to verify more partners, but to create a process that is secure, efficient and partner-friendly.
Improvements realized by bol and Duna
In the past a paper activation code was sent in the post. Letters could take two weeks to arrive, and partners often called asking where their code was. Bol wanted to remove the two-week wait for an activation code and make it easier for legitimate partners to start selling, while at the same time strengthening its understanding of who was operating on the platform.
"When we started with CDD, it was driven by an internal ambition: to elevate and maintain our reputation as a trusted platform." Josje Fiolet, Head of CDD, Bol
The request for proposal (RFP) asked for customer due diligence built around Know Your Business (KYB) rather than retrofitted Know Your Customer (KYC), with an onboarding that could change by client type, country, and risk. It also asked for a vendor that knew the business side and treated onboarding as a commercial process. Most RFP vendors offered the verification step alone and expected bol to build the rest.
Together, bol and Duna designed and implemented a customer due diligence platform that supports the full lifecycle, from onboarding and case management to ongoing monitoring. Combining bol's knowledge of marketplace risks and partner behavior with Duna's technology and onboarding expertise resulted in a solution that balances trust, compliance and conversion.
Duna offers the complete infrastructure. Duna led with how the process actually works, what conversion looks like, and what a commercial company at bol's scale needs from the platform itself.
"Duna knows the markets, and they are genuinely enthusiastic about the problem space. The Duna team is interested in learning what we need, but they also challenge us and bring new perspectives. That is exactly what we needed as a company building CDD from scratch." Josje Fiolet, Head of CDD, bol
How 77% of partner cases close on first review
Bol's CDD department now runs with a dedicated-analyst team. The team reviews every partner who signs up, against policy bol's CDD team configures upstream
Each case file holds the entity, the people behind it, the screenings, the watchlist hits, and the prior decision history in one view.
"We have done more than 20,000 screenings on Duna at speed, because we can see everything in one overview, without pulling sources from multiple systems." Evelien Mols, Project Lead, CDD, Bol
Duna queries the relevant registries and connected data sources before the partner sees a question, then asks each partner only for the evidence the case still needs. By the time an analyst opens the case, the file already holds what the decision requires. Today, active partner time on a new onboarding averages 12.2 minutes.
Partners rate the experience 83 out of 100
The 14-day wait is gone. New partners walk the onboarding once and rate the experience 83 out of 100 on bol's post-onboarding survey.
As regulations, business structures and risk profiles evolve, bol periodically verifies whether partner information is still accurate and complete. That is why bol is also reverifying around 40,000 existing partners on Duna, with each partner spending an average of 11 minutes of active time per case. The partners who do not submit are mostly inactive accounts that no longer trade on the platform; bol offboards them.
Overview of the numbers, from bol’s dashboard:
12.2 minutes of active partner time per onboarding, down from the 14-day wait in the old process.
77% first-time right: partners finish onboarding with no follow-ups.
83/100 partner effort score on bol's post-onboarding survey.
“77% of cases close first-time right with no follow-up. For a CDD team, that is a quality signal. It tells us the policy is doing the work upstream, and the team can focus their judgement where it matters.” Josje Fiolet, Head of CDD, Bol
What started as an internal ambition has evolved into a joint effort between bol and Duna to strengthen marketplace trust at scale. By combining technology, risk-based controls and a partner-friendly experience, bol can help legitimate partners start faster, maintain high standards of partner quality, protect customers and support the sustainable growth of its marketplace.
About Duna
Duna is an AI-native compliance infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and marketplaces. Compliance teams write their policy in plain requirements; Duna's agents translate it into logic, source the evidence and apply it to every case, so decisions are consistent, explainable and current as regulations change. Duna is headquartered in Amsterdam and backed by Index Ventures and CapitalG. Customers include Plaid, Brand New Day, Moss and Bol.
See how Duna helps marketplaces onboard legitimate partners faster, with risk-based due diligence behind every decision. Get in touch.
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