Banks have bought into the principle of centralising data to support Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance and deliver a better customer experience, and are now turning principle into practice. The approaches they are taking to centralise data, the solutions they are implementing and the benefits they expect to accrue will be discussed at this week’s A-Team Data Management Summit in London. Ahead of the event we caught up with Joe Dunphy, vice president of product management at Fenergo, and Neil Farquhar, compliance product manager at Bureau Van Dijk, to find out what they are seeing in the market.
Dunphy says customer data centralisation is being driven by regulation that requires banks to be able to assess risk and exposure related to client relationships accurately, as well by the cost of meeting Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) obligations that have traditionally been key requirements in the US and European Union, but are now being put in place on a more global basis.
Farquhar agrees that banks are increasingly adopting centrally managed customer data solutions, a process that brings with it an understanding of how much entity data needs to be collected, what hierarchy data is required and how the data should be remediated and refreshed. He says hierarchy data is crucial to understanding exposure and needs to go further than entity parent data to include data up to the level of ultimate beneficial ownership.
Centralising customer data is a challenge for many banks, but there are a variety of solutions including in-house development, commercial products, managed services and emerging data management utilities. But as Dunphy points out, whatever the technology solution, projects need executive leadership to make decisions and drive change if they are to be successful.
With these elements in place, the benefits of centralised and automated customer data management solutions can be phenomenal, including huge savings on the cost of managing siloed data, reduced time to trade, better customer experience and the potential to increase revenue and generate new business.
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