Know your customer (KYC) processes can be time-consuming, laborious and piecemeal. The integration of our well-established KYC solution into our Onboarding Accelerator platform promises to eliminate this historical bottleneck for financial institutions and clients alike.

KYC is a critical component of the client onboarding and lifecycle management process. Without this vital step, no trading or other activity can begin. Banks and other institutions want to do business and their clients do too-but the onerous KYC process has too often caused significant delays at the start of the relationship.

Financial institutions are seeking faster and more cost-effective methods to reduce the KYC burden, while still ensuring a seamless and straightforward customer experience. Clearly, speed to market is critical in this competitive field: the faster a bank can perform their KYC and other due-diligence processes, the faster they can start transacting and generating profits.

With S&P Global's Onboarding Accelerator, KYC processes are both faster and easier, for our clients and their customers.

Eliminating a time-consuming, frustrating process

Regulatory changes and different policies across banks, jurisdictions, and transaction types means that there have been no 'standard' requirements or expectations. Customers may be unwilling to provide information to banks without knowing why and where it will be used. And where information can be found publicly, they may be exasperated to be asked for data already available to the bank.

Once gathered, the data processing step is also cumbersome. Information aggregated from both public sources and the customer must be analyzed to ensure that it is accurate and meets specific internal requirements. And that's all before KYC professionals run screening checks and risk scoring.

It's a laborious process, resulting in frustration and delay for both parties.

Producing robust and bespoke KYC profiles

Our solution embeds and automates the KYC process within the onboarding and lifecycle management workflow. We leverage existing, public, and client provided data to produce a robust KYC profile. This unlocks critical KYC data components from documents and enables the feed of that information automatically to internal systems. Quality checking and data screening is built in too.

Bespoke, embedded KYC processes

Tailored to an institution's specific requirements, this KYC process can be applied to customers of the bank, investment managers, custodians, sub-custodians and others. Far from being restricted to one institutional type or asset class, the offering is fully customizable for all customers. Nor does it depend on customers logging in to a portal but can be used as an embedded component to automate workflows.

The integration of KYC into Onboarding Accelerator is yet another successful step in our commitment to our network of buy side, sell side and custodians to deliver a single fully integrated onboarding and lifecycle solution.

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.