KYC Global Technologies: Spearheading the AML Industry with Technical Edge

In today’s world with profound digitization, criminals are becoming more sophisticated at performing money laundering activities increasing regulators’ commitment to anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance. This wails the need for banks and other organizations to work diligently to maintain AML compliance amid a sea of growing regulations. KYC Global Technologies, an AML screening and client lifecycle risk management technology supplier is the answer for this rapidly growing global need. “We help businesses to manage financial crime risk effectively whilst driving improved standards of risk governance through our industry-best audit capture and reporting functionality,” says Stephen Platt, Chairman and CEO at KYC Global Technologies.

According to Platt, companies need to rapidly evolve their understanding of money laundering risk to more effectively manage their vulnerabilities pertaining to financial space. With his long-standing industry experience he realizes that the use of outdated placement, layering model of money laundering and legacy screening and lifecycle risk management tools are the major reasons for inherent vulnerabilities of financial institutions to criminal exploitation. As Platt puts it, “many banks are analogue dinosaurs in a digital age.” The failure of the financial institutions to monitor how their products and services are being abused and criminalized triggers risks. This paves the way for same failures often with an identical taxonomy being evident in the landscape despite the massive expenditure on AML compliance.

KYC Global Technologies, by considering these crucial setbacks, identifies that embracing new and right technologies is an important part of the jigsaw. Leveraging its technical edge, the firm develops innovative RegTech tools capable of providing an end-to-end solution for the management that offer protection against financial crimes. The company renders the world’s first 3D risk-based batch screening solution, RiskScreen BATCH enabling businesses to batch screen their entire customer base against the world-leading Dow Jones datasets in a fully risk based fashion.

We help businesses to manage financial crime risk effectively whilst driving improved standards of risk governance through our industry-best audit capture and reporting functionality

This next-gen batch screening technology for ongoing monitoring of customer risk profiles with advanced metadata reduces false positives by up to 95 percent compared to legacy screening tools. It is incorporated with speedy 'bulk match' process for handling potential hits, complete workflow and audit capture capability, laser-sharp MI and reporting.

With the Dow Jones datasets, the solution gains access to Global sanctions lists such as UN, US (OFAC, BIS, ISN), EU and HMT, over 4,000 global watch lists and black lists, and global database of over 2.5 million PEP records. This enables KYC Global Technologies to mitigate one of the main issues associated with improving AML through technology--heavy reliance on customer data which is locked away and unreachable for several organizations. The firm thus helps them to reroute from revolving around this isolated and fragmented data and allows them to utilize all their customer data to manage risks. RiskScreen is now used by over 800 financial institutions across 74 countries and is increasingly regarded as the benchmark by which all other batch screening solutions are judged.

Identifying the solutions robust features, several organizations continue to approach the firm. Initiatives by regulators to make changes in their rulesets and guidelines including the recent development by New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority (FMA) fuel this enabling the firm to increase its customer base. The US regulators are also encouraging companies to look toward RegTech solutions to improve their AML/CFT burdens. Its Federal Reserve Board made a joint statement with another four US regulators, encouraging depository institutions to explore innovative tools and technology to meet compliance.

Sceptical about the value of AI in money laundering prevention, what KYC Global Technologies has on the anvil is the plan to further sharpen the edge of its solution-stack with the technology. Platt is very optimistic about the new partnership between the firm and Salesforce to bring RiskScreen and Dow Jones data on to the Salesforce platform. “Consolidating the stack and creating efficiencies whilst managing financial crime risk better is the future. We are at the forefront of that,” concludes Platt.