Know Your Customer services are becoming international in scope as more jurisdictions adopt anti-money laundering and other regulations requiring KYC. That creates a monumental problem for multinational companies that maintain multiple banking relationships.

“A company like Apple would do business with multiple banks,” Joe Widner, managing director at Markit, told Markets Media. “They’re each going through the exact same process, and that process is becoming costlier to them because of regulatory oversight and the process they have to go through.”

Anna Mazzone, global head of Accelus Org ID, KYC managed services at Thomson Reuters, told Markets Media: “Financial companies are beginning to realize that the operations investment required to continuously monitor their client for changes to board or corporate actions event is expensive; there is no competitive advantage with this process to justify the investment. If the process is not robust then a firm is potentially subjecting themselves to reputational risk of fines for non-compliance.”

Service providers are launching services that streamline the KYC process by giving companies some assurance that their information is getting to the right parties within the banks.

Accelus Org ID, which was developed in partnership with financial institutions, corporations, asset managers and hedge funds and following discussions with nine regulators from key financial markets around the world, acts as a neutral ‘central clearing house’ by creating accurate identity documentation, which works as a globally-recognized KYC ‘passport.’

Clients of financial institutions submit a single set of identity documents to Accelus Org ID and can make them available to all of their authorized financial institutions.

Tradeweb Markets, an affiliate of Thomson Reuters, has engaged with Thomson Reuters regarding the KYC service and Thomson Reuters Transaction Services Ltd, an FCA-regulated global provider of electronic FX brokerage services, participated in a beta trial of the service and is now live on Accelus Org ID.

“Clients are concerned with the administrative overhead of having to provide information associated with so many regulations (i.e. AML, FATCA, DF, EMIR, etc.) and they are becoming increasingly concerned about information security,” Mazzone said. “Regulation will continuously evolve with the markets and firms need to consider options to neutralize future investment associated to comply with those changes.”

Markit, in collaboration with Genpact, a provider of business processes, operations and technology, have launched Markit | Genpact KYC Services. The service standardizes and centralizes the collection and management of KYC data for financial institutions in order to streamline client onboarding, the companies say.

“Client onboarding is a highly duplicative, repetitive and fragmented process that happens throughout the industry,” Widner said. “What we’re doing now is combining existing products from both Markit and GenPact and creating a service that will collect, enrich, and administer all of the documents and data that are required for the banks to perform that KYC and onboarding process.”

The Markit/Genpact service will collect, enrich and centrally administer legal entity data and documents that banks require from their clients in order to conduct business and comply with KYC and anti-money laundering regulations, including Dodd-Frank, Emir, Fatca and Mifid.

“We’ve created a standard on which documents and which data attributes need to be in place for every entity that is on the platform,” Widner said. “We’ll be rolling out that standard initially for the US and UK jurisdictions, which are obviously a very large portion of the financial transactions, but that standard will meet, or will be very close to meeting, the standards across the world, enabling us to add jurisdictions with relative ease.”

Featured image via ra2 studio/ Dollar Photo Club