ACCUITY TRANSFORMS BANKERS ALMANAC TO ACCELERATE AND IMPROVE RISK INSIGHTS, AND REDUCE COST OF COUNTERPARTY K

Accuity, the global provider of financial crime compliance, payments and Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, has announced a multi-year transformation programme to enhance its Bankers Almanac Risk & Compliance portfolio that will help banks conduct faster and more accurate risk assessments for financial counterparties.

As part of the first stage of the transformation programme, Bankers Almanac Due Diligence Repository now supports the latest version of the Wolfsberg Group Correspondent Banking Due Diligence Questionnaire (CBDDQ), which was revised to set a new enhanced industry standard in financial counterparty KYC. Banks can now submit information via an online form, which intuitively structures and validates the flow of information directly into Bankers Almanac, enriching the profiles of financial institutions and laying the foundations for automated risk assessment. This feature reflects industry demand to digitalise KYC operations, with a recent Accuity KYC survey revealing that 79% of respondents see automating data and workflow processes to save time as a priority. In the same survey, 76% of respondents said that onerous processes remain a challenge for KYC, indicating that improving efficiency has never been more important.

Through continuous innovation, Bankers Almanac for Counterparty KYC, an online tool providing intelligence on over 22,000 global financial institutions, will become more interactive, offering automated contextual insights into the risk of doing business with correspondent banks. By modernising and streamlining the user interface and proactively alerting users to risk-based changes, Accuity is making the solution more customisable and is incorporating the latest user experience (UX) design principles to give clients easy access to the risk insights they need.

Additionally, Accuity will offer an API option to enable financial institutions with large-scale KYC operations to integrate Bankers Almanac counterparty risk insights with their internal systems, providing a greater level of automation. This will support banks in their efforts to reduce the manual process of gathering KYC data, thereby leaving more time for analysts to focus on risk-based decision-making.

Dalbir Sahota, Director, Product Management, Accuity, commented: “As we help customers manoeuvre the complex regulatory landscape, we are actively transforming our technology to ensure our solutions meet the demands of the digital economy. Bankers Almanac continues to be trusted by clients worldwide because the accuracy of our data is unmatched in the industry. We are now harnessing that data in innovative ways to bring business-critical risk insights to users’ fingertips and reduce the manual processing burden, providing greater transparency and helping them mitigate risk in real time.”

These enhancements are the latest in a series of significant developments to Bankers Almanac. In 2016 Bankers Almanac Ultimate Beneficial Ownership data and visualisation tools were added to the portfolio, to help banks meet growing regulatory requirements. In 2017, Accuity launched Bankers Almanac Regulatory Views, using big data analytics to link the entities in Bankers Almanac to sanctions and state-owned enterprise data sets, giving deeper insight into the networks of financial institutions.