KYC Portal has launched a new module called the Corporate On-boarding Tool (COT). RegTech Analyst interviewed Kristoff Zammit Ciantar, CEO to learn all about it.
Following demand from existing clients as well as the feedback received from the market, COT has been designed to address one of the biggest compliance challenges world-wide, the on-boarding of corporate structures.
With on-boarding a corporate structure being ‘a compliance nightmare’, problems are arising from identifying all the legal parties within the structure, assessing risk, documentation requirements and numerous questionnaires.
CEO Kristoff Zammit Ciantar told RegTech Analyst, “The on-boarding process of customers is one of the most expensive processes of KYC within the financial services industry. All companies in the financial sector want to reduce the amount of exposure they are on-boarding with customers, thus the numerous forms, applications, and request for documents when any type of customer is on-boarded, a process that also bothers the end-customers in the never-ending process to be able to become a client.”
The worst part of all this is not only the initial pack of requirements that the corporate gets to fill in first time round, but the secondary and further requests that are generated as a result of the first pack being presented, usually a result of higher risk according to Ciantar.
The new Corporate On-boarding Tool (COT) addresses this challenge by allowing organisations to allow the Corporate in question to have access to a fully dynamic system which is tailored by the organisation in real time.
“This module allows for the on-boarding of corporates without the hassle of to-ing and fro-ing with clients based on data being submitted, eliminating all the communication channels and centralising it into this audited syste. It also instantly calculates the risk across all the entities within the corporate structure,” he added.
The module focuses on giving access to the end customer directly to create and modify the structure of the corporate with all the relevant parties behind the company. It dynamically loads the required data, documents and questionnaires that are required by the organisation in real time, amending the requirements based on the structure being on-boarded.
COT self-assess the risk being on-boarded, instantly changing the requirements based on the organisation’s regulatory framework. It allows the end-customer to be able to populate all requirements securely within an embedded audit.
Upon submission of the application, the organisation instantly receives the entire application detail and structure, all associated documents, questionnaires filled in… and most importantly the instant perception of risk on the entire application. And all this without requiring human input from the organisation’s end.
“Apart for the direct benefit to making the process to a customer easier and faster, it is a system that instantly benefits the operational department of the organisation. However, we are seeing new requests from the market who are after this module for purposes other than compliance – the supplier on-boarding process,” he added.
“Organisations of a certain size conduct such assessment when on-boarding corporates for purposes of suppliers, affiliates and any other corporate relationship. Even though they don’t have any regulatory requirement to do so, such organisations constantly check the relationship with third party corporates to still reduce their risk. This module has started attracting such organisations to Aqubix to address this issue specifically.”
Whilst there are many tools on the market that are trying to adapt themselves to cater for the KYC market, KYC Portal is the only product on the market that fully cater for the entire life-cycle of compliance, from the very first stage of on-boarding to all the aspects of the on-going side. However the two features that KYC Portal offers which no other tool on the market has are it dynamic regulatory framework and embedded customer communication.
Dynamic regulatory framework is a feature that allows organisations to instantly tweak and adapt the entire regulatory framework, not only at company level but also at service level. The embedded customer communication feature solves the issue of having to communicate with end customers through email and other means. The system has an embedded communication system to allow end-customers to upload documents, fill in questionnaires and any other requirements, all of which is fully added to the audit in the system against the regulated entity.