Managing and reporting on compliance can challenge businesses in any industry. For financial institutions, the stakes are even higher as regulations rise, data management increases, and expectations for transparency grow. Financial firms are under pressure to deliver a great customer experience while managing costs, risk, and compliance and maintaining operational resilience.
Know your customer (KYC) requirements have become increasingly important to manage. Financial institutions must diligently track how they maintain customer data and audit risk, placing a mandatory burden on organizations to account for their customers’ identities.
KYC goes beyond ensuring financial institutions are informed.
Customer onboarding is important for financial institutions because it’s typically one of the first impressions a customer has of the financial institution. This “getting to know you” step is an exploratory part of the customer experience for both parties.
During onboarding and throughout servicing, a financial institution gathers the information it needs to fully understand the customer. This includes internal data from its own customer relationship management (CRM) system as well as data from external sources in areas such as financial and credit history, ownership structures, status on sanctions lists and screenings for politically exposed persons, adverse media coverage, and more.
To ensure a positive customer experience, intake of this data should be seamless. If lack of information causes various members across functions to reach out to customers to get essential KYC data, the customer will likely have a less-than-positive experience.
Legacy technology misses the mark for a seamless KYC experience.
What makes management of KYC regulations even more challenging is the reality that financial services organizations often rely on disjointed legacy systems that don’t streamline data. KYC compliance is more easily met when processes are auditable and visible across functions—but not all financial services firms have this luxury.
Complex, time-consuming processes make an already difficult process that much more so, causing delays and requiring manual updates. Rapid change generates resource constraints for IT teams to evaluate, scope, and build requirements, then test, deploy, and put into production. These development projects can take years to complete.
How financial services firms can improve KYC management.
Financial services organizations evaluating technology to streamline data and track KYC information should consider a low-code platform. Low-code technology gives organizations the ability to quickly and easily build applications that address business problems like KYC management with visual process models and drag-and-drop functionality.
A robust low-code platform helps financial services organizations improve KYC management with these benefits:
- Discover parts of the KYC workflow that can be improved or omitted.
- Design applications to manage KYC workflows.
- Automate processes with artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, business process management, intelligent document processing, and other technologies.
To learn more about KYC management and how better-managed workflows improve the customer experience, take a look at our whitepaper, Using Low-Code to Transform the AML and KYC Customer Journey.
