Global consulting firm Protiviti has formed a business alliance with leading process software provider Appway to enable financial institutions to automate their Know Your Customer (KYC) programs in support of anti-money laundering (AML) policies and procedures. The new service makes it possible for financial institutions to significantly reduce the number of manual hours required for their current resource-intensive KYC periodic review process.

Charged with helping U.S. government agencies detect and prevent activities such as money laundering and terrorist financing, financial institutions must implement AML policies and procedures that rely on robust KYC programs. A key element of such programs is a periodic review of their customers’ information. In the past, these reviews have required time-consuming manual processes to perform Customer Due Diligence (CDD) for all customers and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) for higher-risk customers. The new service offered by Protiviti and Appway includes the KYC Periodic Review Tool, which helps financial institutions better manage CDD and EDD requirements and streamline the periodic review process by leveraging Protiviti’s regtech and compliance expertise and Appway’s process orchestration and automation capabilities.

Today’s periodic review process is inefficient and not intuitive. Analysts have to perform multiple manual tasks, from logging into dozens of systems, requesting additional customer information via the branch network or relationship managers to reviewing and summarizing data. The Protiviti-Appway solution eliminates the manual data collection, review, aggregation and validation of the information into one efficient system, and transforms the analyst’s role from data gatherer into decision maker. “As a result, financial institutions get better quality information faster with more consistency and at a lower cost,” said Vishal Ranjane, a managing director in the Risk and Compliance practice at Protiviti. ”The customer experience also improves because banks’ customers no longer receive unnecessary or conflicting requests for information that they’ve previously provided to the financial institution.”

“With our years of experience in anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer programs, Protiviti has the expertise to guide financial institutions in efficiently transforming their current manual practices into highly optimized automated processes,” added Ranjane.

“Traditional review processes are manual and require multiple hand-offs, which is why we offer the solution and tools to manage complexity by connecting the disconnected and enabling collaboration between people, data and systems,” said Nina Schneider, head of Solutions and Products at Appway. “By incorporating Compliance by Design principles, Appway’s solutions simplify daily compliance-related tasks and increase financial institutions’ agility and ability to innovate in an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. The automation of manual and operational tasks frees up significant time for compliance workers and in turn allows them to dedicate time to more value-adding activities.”

Faced with multiple disconnected data sources, financial institutions currently spend approximately 80 percent of the time required for the periodic review process on data collection and consolidation, and only 20 percent analyzing the data gathered. Manually tracking periodic review schedules, verifying sources and fact-checking negative news content about customers takes significant time and leads to errors and untimely reporting. Minimal dashboarding capabilities also limit the production of detailed, accurate metrics and reporting. The KYC Periodic Review Tool contains the following key capabilities to address these challenges:

• Automates the process of collecting data from various source systems (data orchestration), enabling the investigator to analyze the data versus spend significant time collecting data
• Automates searches related to negative news, sanctions and internal blacklists for increased efficiency and accuracy
• Streamlines the process of reaching out to end customers to update their current information (referred to as the Request for Information), with requests systematically generated and tracked, including a verifiable audit trail
• Real-time reporting on elements such as the financial institution’s service level agreements to complete the periodic review process; process exceptions; day-to-day monitoring of individual cases; and trend analysis

Additional Information and Webinar Available

• Join Protiviti and Appway for a complimentary webinar to explore challenges and emerging trends in risk and compliance and discuss practical tools to solve many of the pain points financial institutions face today on Sept. 12, 2019. Please register here.
• For more information on the KYC Periodic Review Tool, please visit here.
• For more information about Appway solutions for the financial services industry, please visit www.appway.com/fsi.
• Protiviti and Appway are proud sponsors of the Digital Banking Conference, June 19-21, 2019 in Austin, TX. Representatives from both firms will be available for meetings on site.