KYC automation platform Encompass has unveiled a new perpetual Know Your Customer (pKYC) maturity model designed to help banks improve the speed and accuracy of their financial crime prevention methods.
The model, devised by the pKYC Advisory Board — composed of representatives from leading global banks and a selected group of trusted data, technology and consulting partners — was designed to place financial systems into a pKYC framework to evaluate their maturity and readiness to more effectively identify and prevent financial crime, Encompass said in a news release.
Currently, it is most common for financial institutions to re-assess customer data at intervals of one year for high-risk customers, three years for medium risk and five years for those considered low risk, opening the door for activity to go undetected for long periods of time. But a rapidly changing threat landscape and increasing regulatory pressure mean interval-based assessments can fail to reveal problems until it’s too late.
“Speed of identification is the main goal for banks, which should realistically aim to check changes to customer risk data in near real-time to swiftly and accurately identify financial crime,” Howard Wimpory, KYC transformation director for Encompass, said in the news release. “Achieving a state of true pKYC isn’t an overnight process, so institutions must constantly build their technology infrastructure to support the automation of core processes.
