The offering involves a multi-lingual semantic engine developed by smartKYC. It uses AI to aggregate relevant data, news and documents on a client.
Private banking and wealth software firm Finantix, whose know-your-client offering has been developed by smartKYC, has won a major contract from Deutsche Bank Wealth Management to power its onboarding and KYC processes.
Deutsche Bank has implemented the Finantix KYC Solution in Germany, its largest wealth management centre, and will next roll it out across the US, a statement from Finantix said late last week. (To see a separate story about Deutsche’s restructuring, which does not directly affect its wealth arm, see here.)
smartKYC has developed the underlying multi-lingual semantic engine for the Finantix offering. The offering uses artificial intelligence to aggregate relevant data, news and documents on a client and – via natural language processing that fully interprets most European and Asian languages – automatically identifies risk relevant information on prospects and clients.
Such tools are increasingly necessary at a time when the burden of tracking changing information about potential and existing clients is a major challenge for wealth management professionals, particularly if they serve clients from certain regions. According to industry figures, it typically can take as much as two months or more to take a new client on board – a serious pain point in a competitive sector.
“smartKYC’s multi-lingual semantic search technology is specifically designed to remove the complexity and labour-intensiveness associated with large-scale name and media screening programs. By combining this with Finantix’s decades of experience in delivering onboarding solutions for the wealth management industry, we believe that we are setting new standards in terms of know-your-customer effectiveness and efficiency. We are delighted to have Deutsche Bank as the latest Tier 1 institution to implement our software,” Dermot Corrigan, chief executive, smartKYC, told this publication.
The Finantix KYC product will include screening for adverse news and background information on clients and prospective clients to create their detailed profile. After aggregation, regulatory domain-specific yet configurable rules will extract and classify key information to enable the bank’s KYC teams to carry out detailed risk assessments, Finantix said.
“By using the latest AI-empowered technology from Finantix we will be able to automate much of our current data collection, ensuring rigorous compliance checks while making better use of our human talent in analysing and investigating the results. Crucially, we will be able to further improve the quality of our controls and risk management while giving our clients a more efficient and smoother onboarding experience,” Jan Wohlschiess, chief operating officer, chief financial officer and head of IT and operations at Deutsche Bank Wealth Management, said.
A few days ago, a group of Nordic region banks announced a joint venture programme to pool KYC operations and reduce risks of dirty money – an issue that has battered the reputation of several banks, such as Copenhagen-based Danske Bank.