Revolutionising Due Diligence Through Data
Over the past decade, regulators around the world have levied some $26 billion in financial penalties against financial institutions for Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC) and other sanctions-related violations.
But beyond eye-watering fines (and often hefty lawsuits), it’s reputational damage that can have the most detrimental impact upon a business. With many headlines of late serving to tarnish the repute of even the world’s biggest brands – and nearly always resulting in a severe loss of business.
It’s this – often irreparable – damage that underlines the need for organisations to become more proactive in correctly identifying who they’re doing business with, and knowing their past and present dealings. This means verifying customer identities and ensuring KYC and AML compliance.
Problems arise, however, when the added complexity of KYC and AML requirements has the potential to turn something as trivial as opening a new account into a long and complex journey. Often, this creates a less-than-ideal customer experience, which translates to abandoned customers and lost revenue.
But this needn’t be the case. Data and technology is being used more and more by organisations to revolutionise KYC due diligence with intelligent process automation, and herein lies the extensive, world-leading capabilities of Encompass.
Introducing Encompass
Launched in 2011, Encompass focuses its efforts on automation for the KYC process and client onboarding. But it’s not a typical business in this space: it isn’t a data company, it doesn’t advise on regulatory requirements, and it’s not an end-to-end workflow in terms of computing.
Instead, Encompass addresses the most complex problems surrounding what analysts are doing within firms where they have requirements to collect evidential proof and information from multiple sources in relation to their corporate customer base.
Powered by intelligent process automation, the platform solves this problem by reducing the time to collect information – standardising an approach and ensuring errors are dramatically reduced by removing the manual processes in line with an institutions compliance policy.
Encompass has a large, and growing, number of integrations that are prebuilt into its solution which it manages, and this is a combination of publicly available data across global registries, listings and exchanges and premium data sets, such as Dun & Bradstreet.
By partnering with Dun & Bradstreet – and integrating our 455+ million global business records – Encompass can automate key elements of the onboarding process, using advanced intelligent process automation. Serving to save resource, money and enhance the KYC process, to ultimately grow businesses in the financial and banking sector.
Protecting and verifying global supply chains
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation has accelerated at breakneck speed. But so too has the opportunity for Dun & Bradstreet and Encompass to help customers in their supply chain.
Together, we’ve already been able to combine global data coverage, as well as reliable and quality ID verification data within Encompass’ automated KYC solutions. This partnership has helped our customers with everything from conducting risk assessments, to understanding corporate hierarchy and discovering ultimate beneficial owners.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg for our partnership, with other joint solutions spanning the identification of regulatory risk, uncovering adverse media, continuously monitoring for material changes and building and maintaining audit trails.
This breadth of services, combined with D&B’s ability to visualise data with Encompass’ solution, makes the partnership a powerful solution for our customers.