Onboarding for EM FX - KYC/AML becoming a real choke point

Anyone else finding the onboarding process for new counter-parties in EM FX increasingly painful? Seems like every year the KYC/AML dragnet widens, especially when you're looking to diversify liquidity sources or engage with local banks in places like LATAM or SEA for better crosses. It's not just the mountain of documents, but the sheer time it takes for initial approval, and then the ongoing checks that seem to pop up randomly.

I get the regulatory imperative, absolutely. But when you've got a prop firm structure, and you're trying to set up multiple relationships to manage various EM currency pairs – $BRL, $MXN, $IDR – the process can delay critical initiatives. We had a situation last quarter where a new local liquidity provider in Southeast Asia offered some seriously competitive pricing on a particular cross, but the onboarding took so long that the market moved significantly against us by the time we were cleared to trade. It ate into most of the alpha we'd identified. Is anyone finding workarounds or specific types of firms that are more agile on this front, without compromising on security?