All agree KYC is a problem, but what is the solution?
by Jack Large
Both FIs and corporates are desperate to speed up on boarding so they can just get on with their business, but AML and KYC requirements keep getting in the way. In all the recent KYC surveys, both parties agree that KYC is a huge problem, as Thomson Reuters latest infographic on their latest research in 2017 shows:
Source & Copyright©2017 - Thomson Reuters
This research showed, yet again, that:
- KYC costs for an FIs are huge, on average some $60m/year
- Corporates still find the lack of a common KYC standard their biggest problem
- FIs take, at least, 24 days to on-board a new client
- Regulation changes are a huge challenge for FIs to keep up-to-date
- Corporates don’t report KYC changes pro-actively and nor do all banks update their records pro-actively either.
The solutions
Many FIs and corporates would like one platform solution that combines the data, documents, rules, organisation hierarchies, and workflow, but:
- Not everyone agrees, some corporates want to keep their data inhouse as they don’t trust any third party
- There are at least three platforms that corporates can use - Thomson Reuters’s, Bloomberg’s and KYC.com’s - which have quite different approachs which one should FIs choose? And which one shoud corporates choose?.
CTMfile take: FIs: do you really want to just one platform? Corporates: would you be willing to use a third party platform? Just one platform or would you want to use more than one?
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To answer your question at the end from a corporate perspective: Yes, corporates should be willing to use a platform, and just one. Anything to standardize and simplify the process as far as possible would be welcome. The fact that we now have three platforms in the market does not help. Can’ someone merge them so that we have just one standard???