Thomson Reuters developing an application to speed up and simplify ‘Know Your Customer’ compliance demands.
One of the complaints often heard in the NeuGroup universe is the pain of bank account opening and maintenance. Electronic bank account management (eBAM) has so far failed to deliver despite “this is the year of…” being touted annually in treasury outlook and prediction pieces.
But the headaches go beyond eBAM to the document requirements surrounding satisfying your banks’ Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering compliance. These tasks have created a sub-discipline in treasury that is more nuisance than value-add and one that should be ready for a solution.
One such solution that we have heard is in development is from Thomson Reuters, and a description from them follows below. This service will look to will speed up and simplify the ‘Know Your Customer’ process which is carried out by financial institutions prior to opening an account with or trading with any other organisation, and which means that financial institutions have to collect identity documents from organisations in order to fulfil Anti-Money Laundering regulations.
This process is costly in terms of time, resources and capital. Thomson Reuters’ research has ascertained many of the key issues are around the number of requests which are received from the financial institutions, many of which are duplicated, and the fact that there is no consistent standard around which documents organisations are asked to provide, in order to verify their identity.
Thomson Reuters is therefore building a Service which will assist in the Know Your Customer Process, speeding it up and simplifying it for all parties.
Benefits of the Service include, but are not limited to:
- Consistent standards: an established set of agreed documents which will be required by financial institutions
- Efficiency: reduced administrative effort through less duplication and reduced time to complete the due-diligence process
- Security: secure storage and dissemination of your data through an automated platform
- Visibility: “permissioning” system that allows you to control who can access certain data and to audit who views your profile
In order to ensure that the service is built with the clients who will be using it in mind, Thomson Reuters is keen to talk to members of the treasury community to get feedback and insight into the features and functionality that you would like to have included. If you are interested in serving on a user panel of sorts and make your voice heard, please email me at [email protected] and I will broker the contact.