Redefining Compliance – capitalising on unknown opportunities

At face value, compliance is a pretty straightforward process - at the end of the day, conducting correct due diligence is but a set of repetitive actions, based on pre-defined documented steps, both internal to the organisation and driven by regulatory requirements.

At face value, once again, one would safely conclude that the entire process is but a speed bump, a minor but required headache for both businesses and their customers alike.

The reality however couldn’t be any more starkly different. What should be a join-the-dots process has become a commercial liability and a customer retention (not to speak of missed acquisition opportunities) nightmare. The operational side of the compliance and AML processes is still a mainly manual process – both labour intensive and dependent on the individual specialists, and the first recourse across the totality of the industry was, and is, to increase investment in resources, in the admittedly vain hope of fixing the problems.

This option is doomed to failure for a variety of reasons, most of which can be traced back to the very same nature of the manual approach, namely:

a) Subjects are considered as being standalone entities, utlising obsolete identification patterns, resulting in both duplicate, redundant records as well as physically separated information silos on each application the subject may feature in, perforce requiring additional checks, time wastage and above all multiplying the very clear and present risk of incomplete search and discovery

b) Even when subject data is not duplicated or fragmented, legacy processes, departmental or jurisdictional variations in modi operandi signify that the data is strewn across multiple sources, systems and formats – from CRM systems to Excel sheets, electronic forms to online reports, physical and handwritten documents.

c) The mindset behind regulatory impositions is to serve as wide a context as possible and to not zero in on specific industries – this is done to both serve as an operational guideline and a catch-all-net as much as possible.The flip-side is that there exist no exact guidelines as to what is expected from each operator, and hence results in significantly differing processes across competitors, with the prevailing mindset being that of erring on the side of caution and requiring over and beyond what is legislatively required, invariably impacting the commercial objectives and customer acquisition goals.

d) Both the manual nature and the generic nature of the regulations combine to a veritable nightmare when organisations operate across jurisdictions and have to abide by different regulated markets.

e) This limitation is further evident in a simple, yet pervasive and all-too-important consideration – internal risk appetites fluctuate, change drastically and directly impact the validity of any data collected and acted upon. It is manually impossible to live up to the expectation of efficiently and correctly mirror changes in risk appetite without impacting customer acquisition numbers, timely acceptance and above all customer satisfaction.

f) Further beyond the initial stages, throughout the lifespan of a customer, the biggest challenge faced by the industry lies at the need to continually review subjects for newly incurred risk factors and lack of compliance.In a manual world, thistask is so gargantuan that beyond swallowing over 75% of the specialist resources and budgets, it is inherently impossible to be accurate or complete, hence correct. In turn, it is truly impossible to manage or correctly execute reviews when one factors in changes in internal risk appetite or changes in regulatory frameworks, requiring a manual, recursive check and modifications of all applications, past vetted subjects and open, operational accounts. Equally, it simply cannot be expected, no matter the size of the pools of specialists, that suspicious or indeed fraudulent relationships or transactions be identified correctly, totally or in a timely fashion, if at all, until it is way too late.

The Opportunities

Integrating fully via web services with any data source, be it internal systems, such as CRMs, core systems and existing onboarding tools, as well as external 3rd party platforms such as screening services, KYC Portal allows for:

• The ability to identify uniqueness of subjects across the entire operation and its services
• The creation of one single record view per customer collating all the data across the entire aspect of the organisation into one consolidated risk view
• Creating a common compliance benchmark against which you could cross-research and anonymously query your processes
• The ability to standardise your regulatory processes across all the jurisdictions that you operate within, whilst still maintaining the single subject view
• Allowing you to automate internal risk appetite as part of the onboarding and ongoing process, totally eliminating human bias
• The automation of ongoing checks on subjects resulting in making reviews a formality – reducing the cost by 60% and your exposure to risk to mere days
• The instant application of changes within risk policies as well as mandated regulatory changes across all subject data

KYCP redefines the concept of compliance and AML due diligence. The platform revolutionises, head-on, operational issues of compliance which have so far been thought of as insurmountable or simply dismissed as being inherent to the process. With the prevailing regulatory climate, the processes are becoming more cumbersome year on year, and automation is inevitably the only way forward.

Get in touch with us today, either by email or schedule your demo with one of our representatives.