Fenergo launches perpetual KYC offering

Increases operational efficiencies and reduces costs by automating ongoing KYC reviews

Dublin, London, New York –20th October 2022 – Fenergo, the leading provider of digital solutions for Know Your Customer (KYC) and Client Lifecycle Management (CLM), has launched a new perpetual KYC solution to enable financial institutions to streamline periodic KYC review processes and reduce costs through automation.

The solution, Fenergo Smart Review, automates the continuous monitoring of client profiles for KYC compliance by identifying all changes to relevant entity data, transactions and anti-money laundering (AML) screening. It uniquely assesses the risk impact of these changes to client circumstances while automatically determining relevancy and materiality. This enables lower-risk cases to be straight through processed while higher-risk cases are prioritized for enhanced due diligence by an analyst. For instance, a change in beneficial ownership to a sanctioned individual, or the appointment of a new exec deemed to be a politically exposed person (PEP), are automatically assessed to determine risk exposure and where human intervention is required. 

Financial institutions are mandated to review every customer relationship on a periodic basis in line with global and national KYC regulatory requirements. A recent study by Fenergo describes a people-driven, labour-intensive process. It found that over half of financial institutions are spending between 61 and 150 days on KYC client reviews and the average cost of a single review is $2,200.

"The requirement to complete ongoing KYC reviews manually for a bank with hundreds of thousands of clients presents a huge and costly operational burden, particularly when genuine key risk factor changes are minimal," 

said Stella Clarke, Chief Strategy Officer, at Fenergo.

“With Fenergo Smart Review financial institutions can streamline the KYC review process by automating the continuous monitoring of clients. This ultimately improves operational efficiencies, while reducing operating costs and regulatory risk.” 

“There is growing demand among banks to ease the operational burden caused by the sheer volume of periodic reviews and the amount of time spent completing them,” added Phil Mackenzie, Research Principal at Chartis. "Fenergo’s perpetual KYC solution ensures that automation can do the bulk of the heavy lifting – allowing analysts to focus on the material risks.”

Available globally to all financial institutions, Fenergo Smart Review is a modular addition to Fenergo’s Software as a Service (SaaS) CLM offering and comes pre-configured with integrations to leading data and screening providers.