encompass has been highly commended in the RegTech category for AI & Machine Learning in the inaugural Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2018 at a ceremony in Singapore on 13 November 2018.

The firm emerged as one of the top innovators in the category after a rigorous selection process, involving a judging panel made up of subject-matter experts and the Regulation Asia editorial team. 

Historically, the processes for gathering AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) data have been largely manual, making them costly, time-consuming and unreliable, with resulting records still reflecting outdated or incomplete information. As criminal threats continue to drive increasingly stringent regulation, financial institutions have been electing to terminate business relationships to reduce their exposure to regulatory risk.

Helping firms to gain efficiency and certainty in their KYC processes, encompass has developed an innovative solution that uses advanced intelligent process automation (IPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) to gather and analyse data from over 100 data sources to build comprehensive KYC profiles for onboarding, event-driven refresh and remediation.

With encompass technology, firms can automatically map out complete corporate ownership structures, discover beneficial owners and their relationships, screen relevant entities and individuals for PEP (politically exposed persons) and sanctions risk, identify adverse media, and verify identities electronically – all in a matter of minutes. The improved quality and richness of KYC information enables faster and more informed decisions, reducing onboarding times to just four minutes and providing a high level of confidence that AML and KYC requirements are being met, noted one judge.

The technology also helps financial institutions to reduce costs and eliminate repetitive, manual tasks, allowing compliance teams to focus on the output, rather than spending time and effort on manually gathering data. More than 350 firms currently use encompass technology, including some of the largest banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, asset managers and law firms.