Multi-Jurisdiction KYC Challenge
Unprecedented downward pressure on the developed economies is compelling even the smaller financial and other services institutions to explore emerging markets that offer growth potential. It involves stretching themselves to operate in multiple jurisdictions. That invariably translates into complying with jurisdiction specific regulations, wherein customer centric regulations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) take precedence over other regulatory priorities. This is beyond seeking basic approvals from the authorities to start operations in these countries.
Such multi-country operations and further complying with their regulations including Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) laws could be a very complex undertaking, if implemented in a fragmented piece meal manner. To tackle such a multi-headed regulatory monster, regular practice is to implement country specific inflexible packaged applications or labor-intensive custom applications, involving huge licensing & customization costs. Such KYC, AML and other customer protection regulatory compliance software implementations require a number of country based hardware servers, expensive application & database servers and operating systems licensing costs. These country-wise infrastructures require local IT support teams, who further rely on vendors support staff under Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs).
An alternative to such a complex multi-jurisdiction KYC scenario is KYCsphere. It unifies multi-country KYC regulations compliance rollouts under Microsoft® Azure™ Cloud deployed KYCsphere suite of applications. With these KYCsphere suite of applications, as listed on the right side, you could manage the compliance processes centrally, drive productivity of operations across continents, manage risk and ensure regulatory compliance spanning the entire global footprint of your institution.
Other Key KYC Compliance Challenges
KYC regulations compliance is a moving target and involves constant tracking of sanction/watch/embargo lists from around the world, along with being in constant sync with regulatory changes in different jurisdictions. There are other challenges that need to be addressed to keep regulators smiling at the time of periodic scrutiny or ad-hoc investigations on larger financial crimes pursued across multiple countries:
- Variety of KYC requirements: Financial as well as many categories of non-financial institutions are required by law to establish well defined processes to meet global KYC requirements. These requirements vary across the jurisdictions that their customers deal in; lines of businesses, product & service portfolios and delivery channels used by them; type & size of transactions undertaken by institution's customers and risk profiles that they belong to.
- Manual vs. Automated KYC processes: KYC processes present a complexity that is difficult to manage through manual processes, resulting in noncompliance and heightened costs. Increased time to onboard and transact with customers, due to manual or semi-automatic KYC processes, results in irritating the honest customers. This would lead to loss of opportunity and if it persists every time the customer transacts, it would certainly make the customer to look for your more efficient competitors.
- Silos of KYC processes: A majority of the institutions with different Lines of Businesses (LoBs) follow mutually exclusive KYC practices for each of the LoBs. Every time an existing customer makes a request for new product or service, it leads to capturing the same customer data and the strenuous part of collecting & verifying ID, Address & other proof documents all over again.
- Dynamic nature of customer risk: Over a period of time every customer's profile changes. They start using new product & services and their dealings tend to expand across geographies. Each of these aggregates individually and blended together could have impact on customer's overall risk. This could lead to a particular customer instantly transitioning to a high risk category, requiring much higher level of enhanced due diligence, as soon as possible. With static risk category assignments to each customer, such a dynamic nature of risk can go unnoticed, causing regulatory damages at a later stage.
- Flood of name screening and transaction monitoring alerts: Name
Screening and Fraud and Money Laundering Monitoring (FAML) products are notorious at generating a flood of alerts during batch scans, that the compliance departments remain submerged under, most of their productive time. To a large extent, static alert generation rules are responsible for this deluge.
- Missing audit trails and historical look-backs: At times, regulatory scrutiny or ad-hoc investigations of fraud, money laundering and other financial crime trails could reach up to your institution, owing to your customer's illegal dealings. In such situations, it is expected that your institution did all the due diligence needed to detect any suspicious activity of such customers, right from the very beginning of their relationships. This cannot be demonstrated without fully auditable processes that are backed by audit trails and historical look-backs, extending for 5 or more years. And this again is impossible to manage without automated processes that would ensure quick responses to regulatory requests with supporting documentation. It further ensures effectively managing the risks of regulatory action and financial penalties for violations.
KYCsphere and its tools listed on the right has been architected to offer solution to each of above and a host of other KYC regulations compliance challenges that you already are or likely to face in the near future.