The global economy is transforming, prompting financial and service institutions to explore technology options like Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to optimize constrained IT budgets. Among the key SaaS benefits is its rapid adoption, projected by Gartner to grow nearly 34% per year. In volatile financial conditions and with a credit crunch, SaaS enables faster implementation, higher productivity, and cost savings, meeting the needs of mobile and tech-savvy workforces. This innovation provides a solid foundation for future advancements in an evolving landscape.

Today’s financial and service organizations face unprecedented risks from financial criminals, fraudsters, and corrupt officials, leading to extensive customer-centric legislations worldwide. These include Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering, and Anti-Terrorist Financing, among others. Such regulations create complex requirements for risk and compliance management, specific to jurisdiction, business line, and customer profile. Increased regulatory scrutiny and compliance costs drive institutions to seek more effective and cost-efficient solutions for managing KYC compliance, internal controls, and regulatory reporting.

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.

Key Benefits of 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:

Unified KYC Platform: Create a centralized KYC platform for your products, services, lines of business, branch and partner networks, and country-specific jurisdictions while meeting unique compliance requirements. A common platform ensures consistent KYC practices across the institution.
Comprehensive Compliance: Achieve 100% KYC processing completeness, accurate data and document capture, thorough customer due diligence, timely regulatory report filings, and full compliance with both country-specific and regional regulatory requirements.
Information Reuse: Utilize existing customer KYC data and documentation across different lines of business within the organization, reducing redundancy and saving time and costs. This data can also support customer analytics for business development.
Partner Integration: Capture customer data and documentation at the intermediary and partner stages, ensuring that partners also comply with KYC requirements, as it remains the institution’s responsibility.
Senior Management Involvement: Facilitate comments and approvals from senior management for timely regulatory report filings through the KYCsphere application, which offers flexible workflows and mobile accessibility.

Additional Benefits of SaaS

1. Rapid Deployment and Ease of Use

KYCsphere offers a toolkit of 10 stand-alone tools that can be incrementally deployed one at a time. The only setup required from your end is basic internet access. Our team handles the configuration of the tools within the already deployed KYCsphere on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. After configuration, we provide web-based training for all users, followed by tool testing. Once training is complete and user acceptance is confirmed, user accounts are set up and configured. KYCsphere is then ready for use in the customer’s live/production environment. The benefits are as follows:

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.
Sanctions/Watchlists Management: Each of the customer subscribed sanctions/watchlists/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 Onboarding: 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.
User-Friendly Interface: Simple administrative features and intuitive interfaces enable easy configuration and maintenance by compliance executives without IT team involvement.

2. Availability, Reliability, and Scalability

SaaS applications like KYCsphere offer significant advantages in terms of availability, reliability, and scalability, all managed by the vendor. This eliminates the need for physical support dependencies and ensures consistent performance. The benefits are as follows:

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.
Scalable and Elastic Service: KYCsphere on Microsoft Azure Cloud offers a scalable KYC compliance service model to handle transaction volume spikes and growing organizational needs.
Extended 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.