KYC – Are your ‘Know Your Customer’ teams on the ball when it comes to Anti-Money Laundering regulation?
Do you have the alerts and in-process monitoring to demonstrate that your business is operating in a legal, transparent way?
A real focus is being placed on companies to ensure that they have the appropriate level of in-process monitoring to demonstrate that their business is operating in a transparent, legal manner.
According to eg solutions, a pioneer in back office workforce optimisation solutions, financial institutions looking to measure and address rising regulatory demands need to focus first on meeting ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) compliance requirements to combat money laundering.
KYC is a banking regulation which demands that financial institutions and companies operating in the sector identify, document and validate the authenticity of a customer before they engage with them. This is a risk mitigator to safeguard financial institutions, systems and platforms and stop them being taken advantage of by money launderers.
“As regulatory pressure increases so have those relating to KYC which aim to reduce the potential risk companies face. Consequently organisations are required to introduce more in-depth anti-corruption due diligence checks within the KYC process, whilst simultaneously meeting tighter demands and deadlines,” stated Elizabeth Gooch, CEO, eg solutions.
“Critical to the regulations governing KYC is the requirement to synchronise numerous processes as well as roles and responsibilities which are complex and detailed. The accuracy of client data is essential toward achieving the objective of KYC and this is where technology can play an absolutely essential role. Data precision is essential but at the same time companies also need to do this quickly to maintain and improve customer satisfaction.”
“This is where Workforce Optimisation solutions, specifically designed for complex back office processing teams, can help organisations to monitor all tasks and process activity performed by investigative staff in real-time, enabling proactive interventions in the fight against money launderers,” added Elizabeth.
The detection systems, processes and policies required to prevent fraud are increasingly supported with systems to support customer due diligence and identify suspicious transactions. Case management systems continue to be the focal point for the collating of information and decisions made.
However, the rising operational challenge is how to predict the volume of alerted cases and then allocate them to the right agent with the right skills, availability, authority and capacity needed to make a timely judgment to proceed with transactions, or indeed notify the authorities.
Ensuring that agent resources are in step with forecasted and actual demand is exactly where back office workforce optimisation solutions significantly contribute to the operational success in combating illegal transactions.
The eg operational intelligence software suite is currently deployed in global organisations, providing:
• Real-time planning and forecasting for anticipated volumes of work, resources and skills required to meet regulatory and SLA targets.
• Real-time monitoring of agent availability, capacity, skills and authority to complete investigation irrespective of location
• Automatic or manual allocation of work to agents regardless of location based on the above with real-time management information and audit trails on the entire operational process
• Links to existing case management, BPM or document management systems to ensure that agents have the right information on hand to review a case
As well as producing detailed post-activity reports with options for independent review, verification by a third party and for staff to check their own work, providing multiple check points, eg’s software solution can mitigate operational risk and evidence compliance.
Elizabeth Gooch added: “The consequences of being unable to monitor or detect non-compliant activity within business activity at an individual or enterprise level have rarely been greater. For many in the financial services sector the ability to provide evidence of compliance activity is vital, no more so than in the back office. In recent years there has been a noticeable clampdown on money laundering. Those financial organisations with lax compliance controls have been hit with huge fines,”
“But it is worth noting that in addition to meeting the regulators’ compliance demands, there is also the growing need for financial institutions to leverage applications and solutions to further optimise their KYC programmes. This is being driven by a need to differentiate themselves from the competition, no more so than in speeding up the client on-boarding process, reducing cost and the duplication of effort. KYC is therefore a number one priority for many in financial services and rapidly becoming a major part of their risk management processes. Because at the end of the day no-one wants to see a rise in identity theft, fraud, money laundering or even terrorist financing and no financial institution wants to be hit by yet another huge fine for non-compliance,” concluded Elizabeth.
Additional Information
For additional information about eg Solutions visit their Website
