London-based RegTech Artesian : DueDil has today announced a solution to one of the most complex challenges impacting banks and financial service institutions.  The company is set to launch its new Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) API endpoint, to improve onboarding speed and customer experience, whilst vitally mitigating regulatory, financial, and reputational risk.

 

Obtaining comprehensive UBO information presents a significant challenge for banks and FSIs.  UBO is a key component of Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) activities, and those institutions without a robust strategy have found themselves subject to vast penalties.  Just last year Commerzbank London was fined over £37 million for AML failings, whilst in 2019 a record fine of £102 million was imposed on Standard Chartered Bank. 

 

Banks and FSIs must evidence that they can conduct effective UBO screening as part of AML compliance, but it’s often a highly manual, time consuming and error prone process.  It can be difficult for compliance teams to analyse and understand complicated UBO structures, especially if dealing with multiple jurisdictions.  However, if a firm doesn’t piece together the puzzle accurately they cannot satisfy KYB/KYC obligations or understand the potential risks a customer represents.  Likewise, failure to conduct UBO checks quickly impacts onboarding efficiency and ultimately customer experience.

 

Jason Knight, Product Director at Artesian : DueDil commented:  "We believe this is a real game changer. Certainly, no other RegTech or UBO provider can connect the dots in quite the same way or deliver an answer anywhere near as quickly as we can, thanks to our Business Information Graph (BIG) and premium APIs.  No matter how complex the ownership structure is, our new API endpoint will significantly speed-up UBO analysis, immediately pinpointing discrepancies, and improving the accuracy and speed of AMLD5 reporting.  Customers trialling this new solution report as much as 80% efficiency savings.”