Thomson Reuters continues to set the standard for Know Your Customer (KYC) managed services, surpassing 400,000 KYC records

Milestone demonstrates market confidence in KYC as a Service and its capacity to reduce the time and costs associated with client onboarding for global financial institutions.

LONDON, NEW YORK, September 24, 2018: The Financial & Risk business of Thomson Reuters continues to set the standard for KYC due diligence with the news that it has surpassed 400,000 KYC records actively managed on behalf of financial institutions. This important milestone demonstrates KYC as a Service’s ability to deliver a scalable and efficient model that supports financial institutions in addressing industry wide KYC challenges, including the growing book of regulatory obligations.

Client onboarding and managing large scale remediation programs have become increasingly time-consuming and costly for financial institutions as regulatory scrutiny of KYC controls continue. With new legislation continuing to emerge in practically every major jurisdiction, financial institutions are required to focus on building a comprehensive, single view of their clients in order to verify their identity, perform effective screening and ultimately help prevent financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorist financing.

“KYC is fundamental to detecting and combatting financial crime,” said Phil Cotter, Managing Director Risk at Thomson Reuters. “Financial institutions are shifting towards KYC managed services to help their ongoing efforts to tackle this challenge, as well as enhance their KYC processes. This landmark achievement by KYC as a Service illustrates a strong track record of delivering for our customers and a long-term commitment to the financial services industry.”

Since launch in March 2014, the award-winning KYC as a Service has consistently delivered identity data that is verified according to a global standard and includes ultimate beneficial ownership unwrapping, as well as on-going screening of all parties.

By building and maintaining a central pool of KYC data that is shared across financial institutions globally, firms have been able to realize cost efficiencies through economies of scale, which in turn have enabled banks to re-distribute budgets to focus on risk decision making activities. This, coupled with the collaborative, transparent and shared approach to KYC data amongst industry participants, is supporting financial institutions in their ability to detect financial crime.

“Reaching the milestone of 400,000 published and maintained KYC records is proof of the exponential growth of our service since the acquisition of Clarient and Avox last year,” said Dominic Mac, Global Head of Risk Managed Services at Thomson Reuters. “Our continued investment in new technologies and automation capabilities, coupled with our operations expertise, delivers a scalable and efficient service that enables our customers to work smarter and realize demonstrable cost efficiencies across their KYC operations.”

KYC as a Service offers client identity, verification, screening and monitoring for accelerated client on-boarding, remediation and refresh built on a collaborative platform that streamlines KYC compliance and the distribution of due diligence documentation. The service integrates trusted legal entity information from authoritative sources in over 200 countries and 60 languages and is underpinned by a global policy that has been stress tested with over 100 regulators and financial institutions.