Fenergo, the leading provider of digital solutions for Know Your Customer (KYC) and Client Lifecycle Management (CLM), has launched a new perpetual KYC solution to enable financial institutions to streamline periodic KYC review processes and reduce costs through automation.

The solution, Fenergo Smart Review, automates the ongoing monitoring of customer records for KYC compliance by identifying all changes to relevant legal entity data, transactions, and anti-money laundering controls (AML). It uniquely assesses the risk impact of these changes on the client’s circumstances while automatically determining relevance and materiality. This allows low-risk cases to be handled directly while high-risk cases are prioritized for enhanced due diligence by the analyst. For example, a change of beneficial owner in favor of a sanctioned person or the appointment of a new manager deemed politically relevant (PEP) is automatically assessed to determine the level of risk. and cases requiring human intervention.

Financial institutions are required to periodically evaluate each customer relationship against national and global KYC regulatory requirements. A recent study by Fenergo describes a human-oriented and labor-intensive process. He revealed that more than half of financial institutions spend between 61 and 150 days on KYC customer reviews, and the average cost for a single review is $2,200.

“The requirement to complete ongoing KYC reviews manually for a bank with hundreds of thousands of clients presents a huge and costly operational burden, particularly when genuine key risk factor changes are minimal,”

“With Fenergo Smart Review financial institutions can streamline the KYC review process by automating the continuous monitoring of clients. This ultimately improves operational efficiencies, while reducing operating costs and regulatory risk.”

                                                             Stella Clarke, Chief Strategy Officer, at Fenergo.

“There is growing demand among banks to ease the operational burden caused by the sheer volume of periodic reviews and the amount of time spent completing them,”

Fenergo’s perpetual KYC solution ensures that automation can do the bulk of the heavy lifting – allowing analysts to focus on the material risks.”

                                                             Phil Mackenzie, Research Principal at Chartis.

Fenergo Smart Review, a modular addition to Fenergo’s Software as a Service (SaaS) CLM solution, is accessible to all financial institutions worldwide and is pre-configured with connectors to top data and screening providers.