Encompass Corporation
Integrating, Aggregating, Automating KYC Processes

For large financial institutions, many solutions are available in the market that aim to transform the Know Your Customer (KYC) process, and, increasingly, these centre on automation. While these solutions may appear to be similar, they are fundamentally different. Traditionally manual, the KYC process in itself is timeconsuming and error-prone, however, with technology, onboarding is a much quicker, seamless end-to-end experience. or not. Aside from the time and cost savings, the advantages, particularly for a bank, go a lot further than that. “It’s about ensuring rigour and repeatability of a compliance process,” says David Williams, Sales Director, APAC, Encompass Corporation. “It’s about providing scale and time to market in that process.” Williams believes one of the most important elements offered by automation is the ability to move to true exception-based handling – something that humans do better than computers. To arrive at such a point, KYC analysts need strong, data-intensive information about a particular client – and the Encompass platform provides just that.

From applying visual analytics to corporate, property and personal information in Australia in 2012, to using intelligent process automation to truly automate KYC for some of the world’s top banks and law firms, Encompass has become a leader in the industry over the last decade.

The company has based its platform on three pillars: integration, aggregation and automation. Leveraging intelligent process automation to access trusted global data sources, the Encompass platform helps source information about a particular entity in near realtime, empowering KYC analysts.

The platform has an integrated content capability, using API access to databases of information. It further integrates with business-based providers that view multiple different data products and sources, and aggregates that into a package. The components of integration and aggregation feed into the automation pillar, that is distinctly different in how it brings data together.

With automation, Encompass can master the task of bringing together all of the content based on the complex business rules that a company defines, ensuring accurate and relevant information is returned.

“There is an exponential benefit that we’ve refined, and that is to give our customers the satisfaction that the information that they receive through our platform is sufficient and appropriate for their process,” says Williams.

The Encompass platform has enabled financial institutions to save days’ worth of manual effort in uncovering ownership and control structures. This is a tangible result, in terms of efficiency and demonstrable compliance, with it being found that Encompass can eradicate 60 per cent of a KYC analyst’s entire work by delivering straight-through processing (STP).

“We’re not trying to convince the financial institutions to change what they are already comfortable with, simply changing the way they do it with automation” adds Williams. “It’s about driving STP rates in the execution of that process.”

There are many business benefits that are evident through the use of the platform, such as increased operational capacity, throughout capability, and better enforceability around compliance, however, its core power lies in taking organisations on a journey to ensure that automation delivers for them today, and that’s what Encompass has remained true to since its inception.