Fenergo, the leading provider of digital transformation, customer journey and client lifecycle management (CLM) solutions for financial institutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the signing of an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement that will allow the companies to collaborate on solutions that can help clients better manage the multitude of financial risks they may face.

The agreement enables IBM and Fenergo to create solutions that combine Fenergo’s CLM offering with IBM’s RegTech portfolio of anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-client (KYC) solutions, all built with Watson. As a result, IBM will offer companies a complete AI application suite that is focused on risk and compliance and helps clients fend off financial criminals and meet their intensifying regulatory requirements for disclosure.

IBM plans to build on this work to assist clients in integrating AI-driven insights from its Financial Crimes Insights solutions into Fenergo’s CLM solution. Fenergo’s software is designed to help clients further reduce false positives in the AML and KYC solutions, reduce the costs of manual intervention, drive operational efficiencies, and improve overall customer experiences.

More than $10 billion in global fines was doled out to companies and financial institutions in 2019 for non-compliance with AML, KYC and sanctions regulations. Since 2008, the total value of fines amounts to a staggering $36 billion. In such a complex and costly regulatory environment, financial institutions and organizations around the world are under increasing pressure to respond and respond quickly.

David Marmer, Vice President, Offering Management, RegTech, at IBM said:

“At IBM, we understand the challenges that banks and financial institutions face in cost-effectively balancing customer experience with detection and prevention of financial crimes. Our agreement with Fenergo will allow us to expand our offering with a more comprehensive CLM solution, providing insertion points for our AI-based anti-financial crimes and regulatory compliance management technologies throughout the client lifecycle.”

Julian Clarke, Head of Partners and Alliances at Fenergo said:

“Financial institutions are grappling with rising costs and fines associated with KYC and AML requirements. Banks and other financial institutions need a CLM system to address regulatory challenges and keep abreast of the changing regulatory landscape. Through this relationship, Fenergo will be available as part of IBM’s offering, allowing access to new and existing clients within IBM’s ecosystem which in turn can help reduce procurement burdens associated with enterprise software. We’re very excited and proud to be partnering with industry innovators like IBM, and the journey we have been on so far.”   

The aim is that customers availing of Fenergo’s platform via IBM will have access to its additional support services including but not limited to global IT support, predictive analytics, system developers, augmented reality, multi-vendor processing and a single point of contact interface.  

With this first OEM relationship Fenergo can further increase its market share and significantly bolster operations. IBM will go-to-market with Fenergo’s CLM platform directly.