Financial institutions facing unique KYC demands will often need to conduct enhanced background checks on clients, particularly those with associations with certain jurisdictions or sectors. This presents significant challenges due to names and various permutations that need to be searched with linguistic and cultural sensitivity. Multiple sources in multiple languages need to be searched to ensure no risk relevant intelligence is missed.
The increased language coverage will allow clients of smartKYC to merge results within a language and across languages which will lead to streamlined results. Natural Multi Language Processing technology identifies all textual elements in a piece of text regardless of source language or script. smartKYC reviews the findings in native language first to avoid any loss of meaning pre-translation and then produces an English version for review ensuring nothing is ‘lost in translation’.
“Banks with an international element to their client base, whether it is by way of a client’s birth, domicile or footprint, monitoring the English language content alone will expose the bank to the risk of missing important information. Extracting intelligence with precision from foreign language sources is essential,” commented Hugo Chamberlain, COO, smartKYC.
The additional language coverage is particularly pertinent for financial organisations dealing with ultra-high net worth clients as recent research from Knight Frank suggests that India will see a 63% increase in this group by 2025. This will outpace the global average of 24% and the Asia average of 38%. Currently, India publishes over 1,000 Hindi dailies with circulations of around 80 million, compared to 250 English dailies with circulations of 40 million. Any firm working with Indian partners, clients or subsidiaries must monitor Hindi media or risk missing important risk relevant intelligence.
smartKYC’s technology enables its clients to drive faster, better and more cost-effective KYC at every stage of the relationship – liberating human effort to focus on decision-making rather than laborious research. smartKYC fuses artificial intelligence with linguistic and cultural sensitivity and deep domain knowledge to set new standards for KYC quality, whilst transforming productivity and hardwiring compliance performance.
