Benefits
The global economy is currently going through a major transformation to begin a new phase. Under such an emerging scenario, senior management of financial and other service institutions want more out of constrained IT budgets, by looking at better technology options such as Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Technology. In these highly volatile financial conditions and in the midst of a credit crunch, the SaaS technology adoption is rated by Gartner to grow at nearly 34% per year. The need for enhanced collaboration among distributed workforces, that are younger, mobile and tech-savvy, necessitates a relook at how technology could serve for speedier implementation, higher productivity and cost savings. SaaS is one such innovation that directly addresses these needs of an organization, and also serves as a starting point to build further upon in the newer world.
More than ever, today's financial and services organizations are at the same time exposed to unprecedented levels of risks arising from the abuse of their institutional framework by financial criminals, fraudsters, corrupt officials, money launderers and terrorism financiers. This has given rise to a large number of customer centric legislations enacted around the world, including Know Your Customer (KYC); Treating Customers Fairly; Financial Product Suitability to Customer's Appetite for Risk; Customer Identity Thefts & Other Frauds; Anti-Bribery & Corruption; Anti-Money laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing. These wide ranging legislations pose complex requirements for risk and compliance management, which are jurisdiction, line of business, product & service type and customer profile specific. Increased regulatory scrutiny and the cost of compliance has resulted in institutions looking for better and cost effective options to ensure tighter internal controls on Know Your Customer (KYC) Compliance, risk
and compliance management, overall governance across the institution, followed by complex case investigations and timely filing of regulatory reports.
KYCsphere is an innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application deployed on secure Microsoft® Azure™ Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and automates complete KYC life-cycle through a suite of tools. By operating at the intersection of cutting edge SaaS Technology and much needed KYC Compliance, it addresses both of the aforesaid important needs of financial & service sector institutions around the world.
KYC Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a method of delivering business applications such as KYCsphere over the Internet. The application is managed completely by the Divas Software team, thus ensuring that it is ready for use in a matter of days & weeks rather than months, requiring least of IT intervention from the customer's end. KYCsphere does not require any software or hardware investments on the part of the customer. Only cost for KYCsphere that customer incurs is cost per user on pay-as-you-go basis. Because of KYCsphere's SaaS delivery, its usage can benefit your institution in many ways including:
- Common KYC Platform: Create a single monolith KYC platform for your range of Products & Services; Lines of Businesses (LoBs); Branch & Partner Networks and Country-wise Jurisdictions, while catering to their unique compliance requirements. Common platform also ensures automatic enforcement of consistent KYC practices throughout the institution.
- Complete Compliance: Ensure 100% KYC processing completeness, accuracy of data & documents captured, comprehensive customer due diligence, timely filing of regulatory reports, and being fully compliant with country specific as well as regional regulatory requirements.
- Enable Reuse of Information: Existing customer KYC data, documentation and due diligence information captured for one line of business could be consistently used, by other lines of businesses across the organization. This cuts down redundancies, creates master data of customers and saves on time & cost. The data could be very useful in running a host of customer analytics for business development purposes for existing & new products & services.
- Extend to Partners: Capture as much customer data and documentary proof at the intermediary and partner stages itself. Thus ensuring that your partners are KYC compliant too, since it is your institution's ultimate responsibility.
- Involve Senior Management: Compliance department could seek comments and permissions for timely regulatory report filings from the senior management, who may be on the constant move. This is made possible within KYCsphere application itself, owing to its stretchable workflow and accessibility through smart phones.
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Speed of Deployment & Ease of Use
KYCsphere tool-kit with its 10 stand-alone tools, can be incrementally deployed one tool at a time, and the only setup it requires at your end is a simple user access to the Internet. Customer specific implementation too involves a simple configuration by us of customer subscribed tools, within the already deployed KYCsphere on Microsoft® Azure™ Cloud data center. Once the configuration is done, our team is ready to provide web based training to all your users. Users then get themselves trained, which is followed by testing the subscribed tools. With the completion of training & user acceptance, user accounts under defined roles are created and configured. KYCsphere is now ready for use in the customer's live/production environment.
- Quick Deployment: Start using the KYC tools in a matter of days & weeks instead of months.
- Ongoing Upgrades: All the regulatory changes driven KYC software modifications are taken care of by us as a routine. These changes may involve necessary upgrades of a single tool, couple of tools or the entire toolkit.
- Incremental KYC Compliance: Since the KYCsphere toolkit consists of independent tools, your institution could start becoming KYC compliant by subscribing to just a couple of tools, followed by subscribing to others incrementally.
- Disparate Sanction/Watch/Embargo lists Management: Each of the customer subscribed sanction/watch/embargo lists are downloaded by us as soon as they are published, cleaned, normalized, translated and uploaded into the KYCsphere.
- Multiple Language Support: The multi-lingual version of KYCsphere supports English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and a host of other commonly used official languages around the world.
- Quicker, Accurate & Compliant Customer On-boarding: Allows customers to submit their account opening applications online along with uploading of their ID & Address proofs scanned images. These could then be pre-screened and validated even before the customer personally visits your institution, at an appointed date & time along with the originals of submitted and any additional documents sought.
- Easy-to-Use: Simple to use administrative features and an intent driven user interfaces allow the application to be configured and maintained by a senior compliance executive, without having to bother firm's information technology (IT) team.
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Availability, Reliability & Scalability
Any software application requires vendor support for its maintenance at near perfect availability; reliability and scalability. Even if the vendor staff is based in the same city, their reaction time could be couple of hours to over a day. If the issue is technically complex in nature, onsite vendor staff needs to escalate it to senior colleagues of his, who may be based in another city altogether. Such a physical dependency is completely done away with, in case of a SaaS application, since it is completely managed by the vendor concerned. KYCsphere SaaS application relies on support of our core technical team for 100% availability & reliability on 24x7 basis. Further, due to its deployment on the Microsoft® Azure™ Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the application could be scaled to handle any volume of transactional load and still guarantee SLA (Service Level Agreement) based performance levels.
- Zero Downtime: KYCsphere is backed by the promise of zero downtime, which means that all its tools are available 100% of the time, month after month.
- Customer Support: Our dedicated support team responds to support requests through web, email, chats and phone. These requests could plainly be either a user wanting to learn more about application feature/functionality or in a rare case an issue that requires urgent resolution. All these requests are responded to in a time bound manner under strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
- Backups & Disaster Recovery: Network server backups of KYCsphere application and database are automatically maintained, to recover from any type of complete disaster. In fact cloud based backups could serve as an excellent option that meets all the requirements of a Disaster Recovery site.
- Expand on Demand: KYCsphere deployed on the Microsoft® Azure™ Cloud delivers an elastic and highly scalable KYC compliance service model that makes it easy to respond to spikes in volume of transactions for growing organizations, around the world.
- Extend to Cover Other Regulatory Compliance: The existing KYC tools could be further extended to cover "Know Your Employee", "Know Your Intermediary, Partner, Correspondent Bank, etc.", "Fraud Detection", "Anti-Bribery/Corruption", "Anti-Money Laundering", "Anti-Terrorist Financing" regulatory compliance requirements. You could further build on KYCsphere framework to address compliance requirements arising out of legislations such as "Treating Customer Fairly", "Financial Product Suitability" and other customer centric legislations.
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Total Cost of Usage
Being KYC compliant would traditionally mean a huge expenditure, which includes the cost of firstly licensing or custom building a software application; purchasing hardware servers; their operating systems & databases to deploy the application & its database; downloading & cleaning multiple watch/sanction/embargo lists available in different formats; modifying the application every time regulatory changes warrant it, etc. These cycles of cleaning & modification have to be undertaken on an ongoing basis. Compliance infrastructures of this nature are expensive since in addition to the above, you would need IT personnel to maintain it, Operational & Compliance manpower to manage it, even before the actual users start working on it.
When you consider all other KYC compliance obligations as mentioned above, associated sunk as well as recurring costs tend to start multiplying rather quickly. KYCsphere toolkit offers you an option to do away with all these sunk costs, control recurring costs, and derive a host of other benefits:
- Zero Capital Expenditure: Your institution could become KYC compliant without having to incur any capital expenditure. KYCsphere toolkit usage at your institution ensures that there are
- NO Application Software Licensing Fee
- NO Application Software Licensing Renewal Fee
- NO Database Software Licensing Fee
- NO Database Software Annual Maintenance Fee
- NO Application & Database Pair of Hardware Servers costs for Test, Live & DR Sites
- NO Operating Systems Licensing Fee for Hardware Servers
- Lower Recurring Expenditure: Additionally, there would be substantial savings in recurring operational expenditure.
- On premise KYC compliance infrastructure comprising of application and database servers at Test, Live & DR Sites would require additional IT manpower and their time to keep it up and running. This recurring monthly expenditure need not be incurred when you choose KYCsphere SaaS subscription. Further, your IT manager's time is saved for higher level IT management tasks of core applications.
- Global, regional and local sanction/watch/embargo lists are required to be downloaded as soon as they are published. Their data need to be cleaned, validated, transformed to destination database structure and loaded without errors and exceptions. Since these lists get published on an ongoing but random basis, an additional Compliance + IT resource is needed, just to manage this activity. It is only then that you would ensure that nothing goes amiss and lists data tables are always fresh and updated to catch that proverbial needle in the haystack. KYCsphere subscription automatically outsources this list management activity to us, without you having to incur monthly cost of additional Compliance + IT resource.
- On premise KYC application as well as its hardware servers require annual costs to be incurred every year, by way of Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs). KYCsphere SaaS annual subscription allows you to save these AMCs costs year after year.
- KYCsphere Subscription Cost: As a KYCsphere customer you save all of the above capital and operational expenses. The only annual expense that you would incur is Per User Pay-as-You-Go cost. You pay this all inclusive usage cost, just like the way you would typically pay for a utility such as electricity or gas, on the basis of consumption. This arrangement gives you better financial control with predictable subscription based recurring annual costs, without taking any risk of sinking huge one time capital expenditure costs.
- Fastest Route to Becoming KYC Compliant: To make your institution 100% KYC compliant, you don't have to seek and wait for any capital expenditure approvals or long term assignment of IT resources. There are no hardware and software to be purchased or getting into multiple months of complex software installations. Within a matter of days & weeks of subscribing for KYCsphere tools, your operations and compliance users could commence the compliance process. You could therefore fast forward organization-wide, process based, complete KYC compliance and start building processes on available infrastructure to be compliant with other customer centric regulations.
KYCsphere streamlines KYC processes and enforces organizational best practices to ensure compliance with global and regional requirements. Intent-driven user interfaces guide staff through required processing activities based on customer, product, geography and risk rating. The cloud based KYCsphere is easily modifiable and is extended to support new business and regulatory requirement changes.
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