Banks rely on Opus to optimize customer identification, due diligence and investigation processes and to provide streamlined, integrated compliance risk and screening intelligence in a single user interface.

The recent Thomson Reuters Compliance survey had a single clear message for KYC: the costs and complexity of KYC are rising. While financial firms’ average costs to meet their obligations are $60 million, some are spending as much as $500 million on KYC and Customer Due Diligence (CDD). The time to onboard new clients was up 22% from the previous year, and expected to increase by another 18% in the next year.

With this release of EDD, Opus has enhanced its capabilities, data access and machine processes to support the additional research required for Enhanced Due Diligence; now clients can find the same efficiencies provided by ACE across the screening and due diligence spectrum.

Kelvin Dickenson, Head of Compliance and Data Solutions at Opus, said: “Now, more than ever, taking a one-size-fits-all approach towards customer identification and screening is unworkable. Regulators have stressed the need for a risk-based approach to due diligence, yet keeping pace with the demands placed on compliance teams and rapidly changing content sources is increasingly complex and difficult.”

These new features build upon ACE’s standardized capabilities and processes that support clients’ CDD processes by providing access to flexible, iterative searching and open-source capabilities. This allows the EDD investigator to follow the facts and go beyond standardized KYC at any stage of the customer lifecycle. Combining the efficiency, control, workflow and audit trail of ACE with the flexibility demanded by EDD investigators will drive significant new value to financial institutions.

Dickenson continued: “We are excited about providing these new features to our clients. Many of the world’s largest financial institutions rely on ACE to achieve KYC efficiency in CDD for onboarding and periodic review; they can now leverage the same ACE user interface to achieve greater efficiency across a wider spectrum of risk.”