ADAM MCLAUGHLIN

Since the pandemic, the difficulties of executing an efficient KYC program, which was already significant, have become more challenging due to the rapid move to digital, increased regulatory scrutiny, increasing data volumes, and transition towards person-not-present onboarding and ongoing customer remediation. To manage these issues, global financial institutions are focusing on improving their risk-based approach, which includes consolidating disparate systems into a single place to provide a holistic view of customers and associated risks. Additionally, the acceleration of digital transformation placing even greater demands on compliance teams. There has been a noticeable surge in demand for automation technologies that understand, validate, verify, and manage the risk of the digital customer.

Ultimate Beneficial Ownership verification and validation are getting considerable attention from regulators, especially given the complexity of some corporate structures and associated volumes of data. It is one of the higher-risk areas in mitigating financial crime threats. Another critical challenge is monitoring relationship networks and understanding connections between parties and any associated risk. The present KYC solutions space requires a comprehensive approach to convert these challenges into potential opportunities. Hoboken, New Jersey-based NICE Actimize has invested in developing innovative solutions that address these critical challenges. “NICE Actimize combines Intelligent automation, AI and machine learning, and network risk analytics, combined with our KYC/CDD domain expertise to increase operational efficiencies and deliver a holistic view of customers and their associated risk,” said Adam McLaughlin, Director of AML Strategy, NICE Actimize.

“These integrated, entity-centric insights allow organizations to quickly identify and act on threats across the customer life cycle without compromising compliance and client satisfaction.” Continued McLaughlin, NICE Actimize views KYC/ CDD as a growth area within financial crime, especially with the greater regulatory focus on understanding customers and managing customer risk worldwide. One such example of greater regulatory focus is the introduction of Ultimate Beneficial Ownership in legislation such as the US AML Act and the 5th Money Laundering Directive in the EU. The NICE Actimize Customer Due Diligence (CDD-X) solution aggregates available information on customers and related parties, including corporate entities and ultimate beneficial owners, analyses and identifies the risk, ensuring a consistently accurate customer risk score. One of NICE Actimize’s powerful CDD/KYC tools is its X-Sight Entity Risk solution, one of its primary differentiators.

It offers entity-centric risk profiling and scoring aligned with Actimize’s Entity-Centric AML Strategy. NICE Actimize offers a holistic view of entity risk by integrating customer risk with transaction and screening risk. It continuously monitors high-risk changes in customer transactional activity, screening results, utilizing investigation disposition decisions, or identifying other risk changes in available third-party data to reassess the customer risk score. NICE Actimize has been at the forefront of driving an entity-centric strategy to achieve a practical risk-based approach and continues to provide innovative anti-money laundering solutions as a service to the financial industry

NICE ACTIMIZE CUSTOMER DUE DILIGENCE (CDD-X) SOLUTION

With the NICE Actimize Customer Due Diligence (CDD-X) solution, NICE Actimize provides complete lifecycle assessment and re-assessment of customer risk as part of the know your customer (KYC) process from onboarding to ongoing customer due diligence to customer exit. CDD-X works with other NICE Actimize AML solutions to deliver a centralized, holistic view of the customer, risk, and activity. NICE Actimize’s CDD-X delivers Entity Resolution capabilities that provide clarity and assurance that the Entity Data is being accurately and precisely assessed for risk. Such precision and transparency are critical for financial service organizations. With an accurate view of the underlying entity and its relationships, the associated risk assessment is more reliable, which helps protect businesses from bad customers or enhanced regulatory scrutiny or breaches.

Furthermore, its X-Sight Entity Risk capabilities provide an enterprise view of customer risk by connecting risk signals from fraud, AML, third-party data, and other risk systems to provide a single trust score for the customer across the enterprise, assessing all risk attributes of the customer. Name screening is also a critical step in any KYC process. NICE Actimize’s CDD-X is fully integrated with NICE Actimize WL-X customer and payment watch list screening solution, utilizing screening results to inform and reinform the customer risk score. NICE Actimize has continuously enhanced CDD-X and its associated components with new features and services to drive greater KYC/CDD process efficiency. The provider continues to invest more in extending a holistic and contextual overview of customers for quick onboarding. As a result, consumer review times are significantly reduced while maintaining accurate results. In addition, with full perpetual KYC capabilities, CDD-X can manage customer risks throughout the lifecycle more efficiently, identifying substantial risk, and documenting or profile changes quickly, reducing overall risk exposure.

WHAT NEXT?

“The anti-money laundering landscape continues to change. As a global leader in this space, NICE Actimize is continuing to innovate, developing and implementing new technologies to improve effectiveness and ensure organizations exceed regulatory obligations and expectations,” concluded McLaughlin. NICE Actimize has created an ecosystem of partners called MarketPlace, which leverages the latest technologies to create a seamless end-to-end solution for fighting money laundering and other financial crime-related activities. NICE Actimize is a market leader that continues to innovate and break new ground with its CDD solution, delivering proven global results to its customers.