To ensure regulatory compliance without compromising client relationships, organisations must structure their client outreach efficiently as part of the Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) space. The "Know Your Customer" (KYC) process is indispensable for confirming customer identity, protecting against fraud, and understanding financial behaviour. Despite the wealth of available information through public and paid sources, client outreach remains essential, particularly for obtaining non-public data like identification documents.
Initiating with sales or the relationship management teams, initial client outreach seeks answers to questions that facilitate the account opening process. These questions will cover identification details, including the customer’s full name, address, and financial history. A subsequent handover to a KYC analyst will then involve sourcing information from public and paid data sources, with client outreach performed for additional detail where necessary.
However, the challenge lies in onboarding clients without creating wasteful processing (or even causing annoyance) through multiple requests for information, striking the right balance is crucial. Organisations should seek to ensure that information already supplied by the client does not get lost or overlooked resulting in a duplicate request, scenarios like this can be detrimental to your client relationship and may give the impression that your processes are inefficient potentially influencing clients to opt out of doing business with you. To ensure efficiency, organisations should strive to automate, reuse data, and minimise repetitive requests for information.
How can organisations achieve this, below are some strategies:
- Compliance and rules driven: Different jurisdictions and entity types necessitate varied requirements demanding compliance with applicable laws. Utilising a rules engine can ensure relevant questions are asked based on the entity type and jurisdiction, striking a balance that acquires enough information without frustrating the client.
- Streamlined outreach templates: Templates listing the information required to satisfy KYC can be updated to reflect the data already sourced, minimising the burden on the Client. Clearly communicating upfront to your clients that certain answers may prompt additional requests for detail can mitigate back-and-forth interactions. Automated solutions will trigger any dependent questions where required.
- Optimising information gathering: A core list of questions, largely satisfied by publicly sourced information, (i.e. primary and secondary sources) aims to reduce client interaction. The less we ask the client the better, the creation of a KYC pack, compiled with sourced data can be sent to the client for review, fostering efficiency.
- Data aggregators for risk profiling: Leveraging tools for sourcing data can aid risk profiling, by automating decisions based on entity type and jurisdiction potentially removing the need to perform outreach for low-risk clients. However, human judgment remains crucial where automation is not exhaustive.
- Tailored outreach and reduced repetition: Tailoring outreach templates for specific clients, avoiding redundant questions and embracing an "ask it once" philosophy can significantly reduce the time and costs associated with repetitive inquiries.
- Harmonising Sales and KYC outreach: Minimising the necessity for additional outreach during KYC file completion by ensuring that sufficient information is gathered by Sales or the RM at the initial outreach stage (account opening process).
- Document management: Utilising structured documents with meta data to define document types and their corresponding evidentiary purposes, ensuring a well organised taxonomy. This will facilitate efficient searching for existing documents, encompassing both content and federated searching across multiple document management systems.
Challenges and Solutions:
Client outreach, often manual and repetitive in nature is a challenge for many firms. Attempts to shift towards an "ask it once” or “get it right first time" approach acknowledge the need for change. Today’s manual processes make the work of gathering information onerous and time consuming. When faced with difficulties finding the right information, KYC analysts will push the problem back to the front office, asking their customer relationship colleagues to approach the customer for the correct data, this can result in prolonged onboarding times, leading to client frustration.
Enhancing your KYC platform with features like help text, tool tips, and data validation rules can significantly improve the overall process. Platforms such as Karbon Outreach take it a step further by providing integrated chat capabilities, ensuring clients stay engaged within the platform. Moreover, tools like Karbon Outreach offer valuable automation features, relieving some of the challenges associated with manual data collection and contributing to a more efficient onboarding experience.Automation also provides the advantage of easily tracking and reporting on aging outstanding outreach requests, enabling companies to maintain better visibility and control over the onboarding workflow.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, client outreach is a delicate balance between adherence to regulations and ensuring a positive client experience. Organisations must leverage automation, streamline outreach templates, and optimise data reuse to enhance efficiency. As the industry shifts toward a more streamlined"ask it once" approach, the focus remains on reducing client frustration and realising savings through efficient KYC processes.
How can Delta Capita help you?
1. We can review your outreach processes in conjunction with your policy and procedures highlighting duplication of effort and redundant questions.
2. Review and streamline your question set gaining efficiencies and cost savings.
3. Introduce tools such as Karbon Outreach to automate processes and/or perform KYC as a managed service.
If you would like more information or a demo of “Karbon Outreach” please get in touch today.
For further reading check out “How technology is reshaping the ID&V processes.”
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