Thomson Reuters is building out its Org ID Know Your Customer (KYC) managed service – winner of this year’s A-Team Award for Best KYC & Client On-Boarding Solution – with the addition of nearly 2,000 entity records a month, plans for geographic expansion, and expectations of signing an additional six deals for the service in the final quarter of this year. These contracts follow the same number of financial institutions going live with Org ID in the past two quarters and including Man Group, BlackRock, Stifel Nicolaus, Tradeweb, BGC Partners and a European investment bank.
The company introduced Org ID in March 2014 and last month broke the 10,000 barrier of complete, validated and screened KYC entity profiles. Steve Pulley, global managing director of KYC and client onboarding solutions at Thomson Reuters, says towards 2,000 records were added to the service in October and the number is rising as the company proves in practice to clients, particularly banks, that Org ID can help them accelerate client onboarding and deliver cost savings that can’t be achieved using manual in-house processes.
The managed service monitors and screens entities incorporated in 144 jurisdictions on a 24×7 basis, detecting and publishing changes to entities that service users may need to know about. It includes a standard policy that can be tailored to ensure financial firms comply with local KYC regulations in major capital markets centres, and provides English translation extracts from over 50 languages.
Explaining that Org ID is a managed service rather than a utility, Pulley says: “We recognise that the banking community wants to outsource parts of the KYC process such as data collection and sanctions checking, but different jurisdictional regulations can include different requirements, which means banks operate slightly differently. This means we need to tweak the service to meet different banks’ needs. Org ID is a high value added service, not a commoditised service, and financial institutions use it because getting KYC wrong is very expensive.”
Take-up of the service is mostly among banks that must comply with KYC regulation and asset managers that must carry out due diligence on banks and broker/dealers they trade with. Some large hedge funds and market infrastructure players, particularly foreign exchange execution venues that must run KYC checks on firms using their platforms, are also signed up to the service, although banks are expected to represent the largest slice of the Org ID customer base going forward.
Pulley says Thomson Reuters is building Org ID for the long term as a large community play and expects the number of KYC entity profile reports it manages to grow exponentially. He concludes: “Thomson Reuters Org ID is the world’s largest client entity onboarding and KYC managed service, a truly global service addressing clients’ specialised needs across many regulatory jurisdictions, with more being added regularly. We have strong global coverage in the fast-growing fully-screened customer records and counterparty due diligence space, and are poised to tap dynamic emerging markets in Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, working closely with banks to collect and manage KYC entity data on their customers, irrespective of where they are based. We will have more to say about how we are establishing our presence in these regions in the next few months.”
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