Outreach plays a pivotal role in KYC and AML processes. In instances where crucial information and documents are not accessible in the public domain, companies need to reach out to clients. This outreach is essential to fill in the gaps, allowing clients to fulfil their KYC and AML obligations seamlessly.
What Makes Outreach A Painful Process?
Clients might be reluctant to open or reply to emails that ask for confidential or personal data, with concerns around social engineering and phishing attempts. The varying information requirements of different companies they deal with can make it difficult for them to comprehend the exact details they are being solicited for and the reasons behind it.
Supporting document requests to evidence the information, in particular requirements around validity periods or legal certification for regulatory evidence can be a point of pushback. It can be challenging for clients when different companies have varying requirements regarding the data points visible on the documents.
Outreach can be a long and challenging experience, often entailing numerous email chains back and forth and quite a few reminders as both Clients and AML teams work through the above challenges.
Why Is Now The Right Time To Digitise?
With B2C leading the way in customer experience and digitisation, now is a good time for B2B to follow suit and leverage digital platforms to improve their client outreach experience.
According to McKinsey’s article ‘Five actions to build next-generation know your customer capabilities’, providing a digitised client portal offering capabilities for clients to self-serve (eSig, upload documents digitally, view case status) is a key capability in next-generation KYC offerings.
The Power Of A Digital Outreach Portal
Digital outreach portals provide a secure channel for the communication of sensitive or private information. Multi-factor authentication or embedding outreach portals with company secure portals provide additional layers of security and comfort to clients.
Digital Outreach can help to present KYC and AML requirements in small bite-size and easy to understand tasks. Online chat, help bots and tooltips can help provide timely clarification or explanation as to why the information is required whilst automated input checks can help reduce input errors and minimise the feedback loops.
On platform feedback, clearly tagged to the relevant item helps provide ease of context and traceability to previously submitted information or documents for clients.
A digital portal can provide a central digital space, for multiple client users to collaborate to provide the requested information and documents. It can also be integrated into wider account or onboarding portals to provide a seamless user experience.
Combining a digital portal within a wider strategy to automate and straight through process KYC and AML processes, can reduce operational costs and reduce the overall time to complete. Some digital platforms provide OCR capabilities which assist in both the data collection and validation, particularly in the Identity Verification steps as discussed in The Transforming Power of Technology in Identity Verification and Validation.
Digitisation Is A Journey
Adapting to change is challenging, and the convenience of emails often serves as an escape route, leading to resistance against any behavioural shift. However, by choosing an appropriate digital platform, making the advantages clear, and alleviating manual difficulties, both AML/KYC teams and clients can be encouraged to maintain their interactions on the digital platform.
The need for updating policies and evidence requirements is imperative to stay informed on the digital signatures, system audit trails, and electronic Identification and Verification offered by a digital platform.
The operational processes for outreach and the approach to collecting information and evidence will need to be re-designed to fit the controlled pre-configured automated model to maximise the benefit of automation.
As with all digitisation, systems, processes and practices will evolve with use and be optimised over time. User and system behaviours will adapt over time as digital portals become the new norm and new digital capabilities become available.
Balancing Speed And Control
As financial service organisations balance quality and speed of service with control and regulatory obligations, now is the time to use digital platforms to improve client outreach processes and experience. By minimising friction and expediting the outreach process, companies can enhance the overall client and business experience.
How Delta Capita Can Help
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