Financial House
Moody’s KYC has revolutionized the risk management and compliance practices of organizations using our cutting-edge platforms and data-driven solutions. Our case studies provide personalized, real-life stories of our customers’ KYC processes at work.
Financial House operates a complex compliance process, which works in numerous jurisdictions, covers corporate onboarding and ongoing risk monitoring, and it has several human touch points.
Its agent network provides the first line of defense in its compliance process. Then Financial House completes its risk monitoring plan by reviewing information supplied by the agents.
The firm needed a method to automate KYB checks and orchestrate the process for different teams involved in due diligence. It needed access to accurate KYB data to assess risk at onboarding and during ongoing monitoring. And, it wanted a central repository for customer documentation so teams could access it easily and on-demand.
Under the stewardship of a new money laundering reporting officer (MLRO), Metkel Asfaha, Financial House restructured its compliance function, employing new staff, creating new policies, and introducing a new coordinated RegTech system.
There were existing compliance processes, but the MLRO wanted to align the function, bringing together automated onboarding, risk classification and assessment, and ongoing monitoring in Passfort.
In September 2020, Financial House began work on a systems integration project, which included customer onboarding and ongoing risk monitoring.
Financial House has a very specific onboarding process for the companies it is doing due diligence on, tasks can become complicated quickly. Passfort helps the customer handle this complexity while alleviating manual effort involved in due diligence and risk management.
Now Financial House's teams don't need to launch checks, chase down documents, or update them in certain folders. This happens online in Passfort.
Passfort has automated the firm's complex corporate onboarding and ongoing monitoring processes. And the solution brings agents and analysts into the compliance process where they add value to review cases or to make risk-based decisions.
To satisfy its KYB, sanctions, and adverse media data checks, Passfort integrated Financial House's choice of third-party data providers into its compliance processes. As a result of working with Passfort, Financial House is now realizing savings by having removed a duplicate data source used in its screening process.
Previously, KYB documents would have been saved on servers by Financial House. Now, agents rely on Passfort to store and access customer documentation.
All KYB documents are kept in one place - they are saved in Passfort. Anybody needing information knows it’s in the platform, and they know how and where to get it.
"Passfort has made our whole process much easier to follow, it automates key tasks, and it also acts as a central repository for customer documentation."
“The reason Financial House chose to partner with Passfort was because we needed a solution that allowed us to manage very complex KYB and corporate onboarding activity."
"Passfort has made our whole process much easier to follow. It automates key tasks and also acts as a central repository for customer documentation."
"Of real significance to Financial House was Passfort's ability to perform ongoing monitoring of corporate clients, allowing us to carry out ongoing risk assessment after set periods of time depending on the level of risk, while refreshing key documents."
"As a Head of Financial Crime and MLRO, Passfort allows me to input into the platform all the necessary requirements for the specific type of business we are onboarding and then we get a risk assessment, which means we can construct ongoing monitoring for the long-term. All this is done seamlessly on the platform. Once we set up what our requirements are, our users have a much easier task when it comes to checking documents and making decisions."
"I've worked in other businesses where the onboarding process is done manually, and I can tell you the difference Passfort makes from a compliance analysts’ perspective in terms of work requirements."
"While we have been dealing with many changes and new systems as an organisation, my experience is that Passfort has been one of the few things it has been easy to deal with. In terms of responses, support, every time we have a query, the integration – everyone has been supportive. If we send out emails, we get responses in minutes and that doesn't happen with other partners."
St. James’s Place partners with Passfort, a Moody’s company, integrated with GBG to deliver customer due diligence driving easier, faster, data-driven KYC decisions and a 9% increase to its customer pass rate.
St. James’s Place offers effective wealth management and financial planning advice to individuals, trustees, and businesses.
St James’s Place (SJP) is a unique wealth management business, offering financial advice and proprietary investment products via its network of approx. 2,500 partners. These financial advisors own and manage client relationships with more than 850,000 customers. The majority of customers are in the United Kingdom with a smaller international client base managed with support from SJP operations in Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China.
Know your customer (KYC) checks in operation throughout the SJP partner network had always been thorough but processes were manual and time-consuming in some circumstances. Partners were responsible for completing verification of identity as part of customer onboarding, reviewing, and recording the regulatory prescribed identity documents on a report, and submitting that to SJP’s administration centre. There, a customer file would be created and maintained. Regulatory compliance was met but there was a clear opportunity to improve efficiencies.
St James’s Place wanted to continue its commitment to thorough customer due diligence and risk monitoring while streamlining its KYC process; making it simpler for customers and partners to engage with. SJP wanted to arrive at a decision to pass new customers and get to the point of product delivery with minimum friction.
To streamline and automate its KYC processes and move the onus of manual onboarding and risk monitoring away from its partner network, SJP chose to work with Passfort, a Moody’s company, integrating GBG data checks.
To automate customer due diligence processes, SJP selected Passfort Lifecycle, which digitises all its customer journeys. The KYC checks partners need to complete are orchestrated in the Passfort platform, which integrates GBG ID3global and Multi Bureau solutions.
Multi Bureau, part of the ID3global digital identity verification solution, gives SJP direct search access to the major UK credit bureaus. By interrogating all trusted credit reference agency data in one search and delivering a match against two separate credit records – such as a mortgage, credit card or bank loan – SJP can achieve a reliable UK measure for compliant KYC checks in moments and maximise the number of new customers passing straight through onboarding first time.
By continuing to set a high standard in customer due diligence and directing customer onboarding decisions towards highly efficient, data-driven identity verification, SJP has been able to automate its KYC processes and deliver a gold standard for compliance. It delivers a better, simpler, and faster compliance experience for customers and partners.
Choosing to work with Passfort Lifecycle and GBG, SJP has created a more streamlined, automated solution for KYC, which has helped speed up and scale customer onboarding. During the first two years of operation, partner practices have compliantly onboarded more than 150,000 new customers. And since adopting Multi Bureau as a solution for identity verification, SJP has improved its customer pass rate by 9%.
"One of our corporate strategies is to make it easier to do business with SJP, and that was a key objective for the KYC solution we chose. We wanted flexibility and the ability to switch data providers - and that’s what we got with Passfort Lifecycle integrated with GBG. Since adopting the GBG Multi Bureau solution for KYC checks, St James’s Place has improved its customer pass rate by 9%."
GC Partners is a specialist financial services provider that moves money overseas. Since 2003, GC Partners has made it simple for over 150,000 clients to transfer money to more than 125 markets across the world. Using competitive exchange rates, its bespoke services are designed to be quick, reliable, and secure.
GC Partners, based in the UK, onboards both individual and corporate customers and wanted to digitally transform these onboarding journeys. Operating manual processes was not optimal, and gathering the data required for know your customer (KYC) and know your business (KYB) checks needed to be brought into one solution that was scalable and that the team could collaborate on.
Separate compliance journeys were required for the different types of due diligence GC Partners conducts. For individual customers they needed to verify identity and maximizing automation. For corporate onboarding, or KYB, enhanced data checks were required such as information about ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO).
With its global reach, GC Partners onboarding solution had to be flexible to meet AML compliance in different jurisdictions, and the processing power needed to be scalable as its business grew.
Passfort, a Moody’s solution, was implemented by GC Partners to digitally transform its risk policies for onboarding individual and corporate customers.
They now operate smart policies for know your customer and know your business compliance. These smart policies are used to create a dynamic risk profile of each individual or business entity, so onboarding decisions can be reached swiftly and with confidence based on robust data.
GC Partners has orchestrated workflows of automated data checks for individuals and business clients, integrating different data sources from leading global providers. Its two main types of digital journey have been tailored to include identity, fraud, adverse media, politically exposed persons (PEPs), sanctions, and company ownership information to develop a full picture of risk related to each account.
Teams across GC Partners also use the Passfort solution to collaborate on profiles, escalate high-risk cases, and keep the onboarding process moving, particularly when dealing with more complex KYB onboarding.
"The journey of implementing Passfort has seen us look at each aspect of our different types of customer onboarding journey and the risks we need to understand about both individual and corporate clients. Now we are operational, we are seeing the process in action – our smart policies, the integrated data checks, and the communication both across teams and with our customers. We’re happy with the progress made so far with Passfort and excited about the benefits it will deliver in the future in terms of compliance efficiency and providing our customers great onboarding experiences."
BitPay is a pioneer and leader in global blockchain payments. The company’s suite of products enable businesses to accept cryptocurrency payments globally for ecommerce goods and services or cross border transactions while receiving settlements in fiat currency.
In addition, BitPay powers a secure wallet used to store cryptocurrency, make payments or liquidate cryptocurrency to fund a prepaid debit card or dozens of retail gift cards. The BitPay Card enables customers to instantly turn cryptocurrency into fiat currency, which is then loaded onto the card and can be spent anywhere Mastercard debit is accepted around the world.
It has a global customer base and is experiencing huge growth. The company has offices in Atlanta, USA, and Europe, with 38 full-time employees in risk and customer success functions working on Customer Lifecycle Management processes.
BitPay's philosophy has always been to set a compliance standard in the world of blockchain payments. It is the largest bitcoin payment processor in the world and sets a best practice precedent in terms of meeting regulation.
BitPay is very well established, serving leading merchants around the world and it has achieved rapid growth. The firm is expanding by introducing new individuals and businesses to the world of crypto payments each day.
With the hope of welcoming a world of new customers, BitPay needed a Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution that would scale, achieve higher conversion rates, reduce drop offs and deliver practice on KYC compliance and risk management.
Passfort was selected by BitPay to automate its customer onboarding journeys and carry out ongoing risk monitoring. We have now worked together closely for 2 years.
BitPay has a high volume of new customers applying for its products each day across the world. The number of approved applications more than doubled from 12k in Q1 2020 to +30k in Q2 2020.
Passfort digitised BitPay's workflow of KYC checks, maximising Straight Through Processing (STP), which means high numbers of applications can be handled with no manual intervention.
BitPay achieves an average STP rate of 89%.
It was also hugely important for BitPay to reduce abandonment rates during due diligence. This was about Passfort helping to make the KYC process as fast and frictionless as possible.
Passfort has been able to reduce the average Time To Decision (TTD) to 3mins on new applications. And, working with our data provider partners, BitPay's approval rates increased by 9% from Q1 2020 to Q2 2020.
Passfort has ensured high volumes of applications can be processed automatically; delivered faster Time To Decision on applications; helped increase approval rates; and ensured BitPay sets a standard for compliance.
"BitPay is a pioneer and leader in global blockchain payments. It has grown into the largest bitcoin payment processor in the world, serving industry-leading merchants on six continents supporting hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users."
"It is a registered Money Service Business with FinCEN, a licensed money transmitter in numerous states and regulated business that complies with the Bank Secrecy Act."
"BitPay is going through an exciting period of rapid growth with the addition of more crypto payment products for both businesses and individuals everywhere."
"I am very impressed with Passfort as it helps BitPay in setting a great compliance standard and framework for the crypto industry."
"Passfort has scaled to support our demand with its great platform and world-class team!"
"BitPay is now able to provide its customers with a great onboarding experience that is robust, automated and seamless. Passfort also provides us with great ongoing risk monitoring, real-time alerts and reports."
"I love working with Passfort and the Passfort team; they make KYC, KYB, PEP/Sanctions/Adverse Media checks, risk scoring, ongoing monitoring, data retention, detailed metrics and reporting actually a lot more fun and easy for us."
Headquartered in Singapore, FOMO Pay's vision is to empower merchants and corporate clients with top-tier digital payment and digital banking solutions to meet their evolving needs. The company offers a comprehensive suite of products tailored to facilitate seamless fiat and digital payment token transactions and streamline financial operations. With the pandemic accelerating adoption of digital payments in the region, FOMO Pay has observed a rapid increase in the number of merchant and institution customers year on year.
In its commitment to remain at the forefront of global compliance trends and employ leading technologies for effective risk management, FOMO Pay wanted to upgrade its existing know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliance solution to accommodate its growth – enhancing the compliance team’s workflow through automation; increased speed; improved coverage; and ease of integration.
Although FOMO Pay commenced its journey in Singapore, the company’s expansion in Asia and globally meant its Compliance team needed a solution that would allow FOMO Pay to tailor workflows to accommodate regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
Risk-relevant screening
As a regulated fintech company, FOMO Pay places a strong emphasis on ensuring that its operations and risk management are aligned with the ever-evolving global regulatory standards. FOMO Pay was in the market for a robust compliance solution that could maintain the integrity of FOMO Pay’s risk policies and enable efficient monitoring of risk-relevant screening alerts by the team.
Access to company information in real time
One aspect that fintech players often need to tackle is the efficient retrieval of documents from entities globally, considering the lack of standardized documents and the jurisdictional variations across different countries. To reduce manual work at the onboarding stage, FOMO Pay subscribed to our data solution that gives FOMO Pay access to a global network of commercial registers, financial authorities, and tax offices in over 200 countries and jurisdictions. The ability to retrieve original data and documents from the primary source reduces the time FOMO Pay spends conducting KYC checks, enhancing FOMO Pay’s compliance capabilities and reducing friction in its client onboarding experience.
Onboarding lifecycle management
FOMO Pay implemented a scalable end-to-end KYC and AML solution from Moody’s. Using Passfort, our automated lifecycle management tool backed by our global entity information, adverse media, sanctions, watchlists, and politically exposed person (PEPs) database, we created different workflows to support various onboarding scenarios. This solution effectively enhances operational efficiency and allows industry players to conduct risk assessments to onboard employees, partners, and customers digitally, and perform ongoing monitoring efficiently.
Time savings and reduction of manual work
Moody’s KYC solution further enhances FOMO Pay’s efficiency and accuracy in risk detection – assisting corporate registry search, streamlining watchlist screenings, and reducing manual compliance tasks.
Integrated data checks are supported in the lifecycle management platform, enabling FOMO Pay to orchestrate its combination of checks with a tailored compliance data ecosystem – while maintaining a single API.
Dedicated customer support
The Moody’s project team worked closely with FOMO Pay throughout the implementation process to ensure the end-to-end KYC and AML solution was customized to the company’s needs and requirements.
In collaboration to further enhance and improve our solutions for customers, Moody’s regularly compiles valuable feedback from the FOMO Pay users to share with internal product teams.
“We are delighted with this implementation. FOMO Pay made a strategic decision to leverage Moody’s strengths and gain access to its extensive and accurate global data which now empowers FOMO Pay to make optimal risk-based decisions. This implementation strengthens our KYC/AML program. As a result, our KYC/AML checks are now more efficient and accurate, our processing speed has increased, and we have reduced friction during onboarding.”
“FOMO Pay is committed to empowering businesses worldwide with integrated, secure, and frictionless digital payment and digital banking experiences, enhancing fiat and digital currency interoperability. With our business growth, we sought a KYC solution provider combining industry-leading capabilities and rigorous global compliance standards. We’re pleased to implement Moody's Analytics KYC and AML solutions to further enhance our risk management and compliance capabilities. This implementation aligns with our commitment to upholding the highest standards of compliance, security, and customer trust.”
Lim Wee Teck
Head of Compliance | FOMO Pay
Louis Liu
Founder and CEO | FOMO Pay
Longhorn Investments is a direct private lender offering short-term acquisition and renovation capital to real estate investors for both residential and commercial assets. Formed in 2008, they operate in major metropolitan areas throughout Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina.
Longhorn was experiencing challenges in their client onboarding and offboarding processes. A lot of manual and disconnected processes led to inconsistency. Inefficiencies in their due diligence were hindering scaling the program effectively as the organization grows.
After a few interesting conversations with the Moody’s team, Jeremiah Garza, Chief Operating Officer at Longhorn Investments realized the entire compliance operation needed a new foundation. Garza explains, “After over a decade of fragmented manual processes the Moody’s team presented us with an option that streamlined our onboarding process. The systematic approach to onboarding clients will increase efficiency and streamline our approval process, and by using their API we are able to eliminate manual data entry.”
Longhorn, with a renewed vision, has transformed its client lifecycle by collaborating with Moody's. They’re leveraging Orbis data to identify and tag beneficial owners. Grid is used for constant screening against sanctions, PEPs, and adverse media, yielding transparent results that can be seamlessly shared with internal stakeholders. To address scalability, Longhorn employs Passfort for automating workflows, data verifications, and case management throughout the compliance lifecycle, thereby enhancing efficiency and customer experiences.
“The Moody’s Analytics team provided us with a systematic approach to onboarding our clients,” says Jeremiah Garza. “By combining multiple manual processes into one workflow, we have created an efficient way to bring new clients onboard. Passfort allows us to automate workflows and with ongoing monitoring we are confident Passfort is the robust fraud prevention and compliance tool we have been searching for.”
The ShopBack Group is Asia-Pacific’s leading shopping, rewards, and payments platform, serving over 40 million shoppers across 11 markets. Driven by the vision to become the world's most rewarding way to shop, ShopBack is dedicated to saving members money and time, while delivering delightful experiences with every purchase. The platform also enables merchants and brands to engage with their members in a cost-effective manner.
ShopBack, a rapidly scaling business with ambitions to expand its presence in Asia-Pacific and Europe, wanted to automate the client onboarding process for its business-to-business merchant clients. The compliance workflow for the company’s financial services arm includes know your business (KYB) checks on these merchants as part of its due diligence process – performing screening on connected parties against relevant databases such as sanctions, politically exposed persons, and adverse media databases.
ShopBack’s goal was simple: Streamline the merchant onboarding process while reducing friction and improve efficiency. Moody’s worked with ShopBack to build a consolidated, end-to-end compliance workflow in Passfort, our CLM tool, integrating our comprehensive global entity database and name screening solutions, Kompany and Grid. Using Passfort’s smart policies feature, ShopBack configured a unique workflow of automated compliance checks in accordance with its risk policy for straight-through processing.
“We are thrilled with the outcome of this implementation. ShopBack strategically chose to harness Moody's expertise, providing us with access to their comprehensive global data. This decision has empowered ShopBack to enhance our ability to make risk-based decisions that are optimized for success. Our AML checks are now not only more efficient but also more accurate, contributing to a substantial increase in our processing speed. As a result, we've successfully minimized friction during the onboarding process, ensuring a smoother experience for our merchants.”
This client is a global leader in the financial world, providing banking, personal investment, and corporate business management services to the world’s biggest companies, governments and international organizations.
Innovating in banking for more than 150 years, the institution offers all-round assistance in every major city. Today, this financial institution continues to develop and maintain innovation and award-winning services to suit every type of banking need for a world of customers
This global banking customer needed a modernized automated Entity Verification and Maintenance solution to serve its investment and commercial banking divisions better and faster. Its legacy solution presented data quality issues preventing the bank from implementing an optimal straight-through processing (STP) validation process to improve the entire workflow.
It was essential the entity verification solution formed the foundation of the bank’s client reference data system. The process of automatically validating the identity and authenticity of legal entities was central to its KYC and onboarding processes, part of its wider compliance and risk management strategy. In addition, the trusted entity verification data also needed to augment “Golden Records” for the bank’s clients across the wider business; both for compliance and non-compliance related customer engagement strategies.
A lot of human effort was needed to capture, cleanse, and reconcile the data needed, which was being done in multiple silos across multiple teams, which wasn’t efficient or cost effective. This disparate, manual effort inhibited oversight and meant the continued effort to maintain records within reasonable cost and timeframe was unachievable.
The bank’s existing entity verification data solution couldn’t offer sufficient data, scalability, or integration in an efficient, unified way. The customer needed a single, trusted, global source for checking registries and accessing risk-relevant data to confirm the legitimacy of counterparties it planned to work with. Moreover, the bank needed an efficient way to monitor their client data for changes and refresh the data.
The solution also needed to maximize automation and to execute at scale, with future plans for ongoing refresh of the entity verification data on a perpetual basis.
The bank chose to implement Moody’s Entity Verification API as a game-changer to the way entity data was accessed and integrated for KYC and onboarding, while making it part of master data management.
Through a single source, the Entity Verification API enables the customer to access entity data from Moody’s comprehensive global risk database, with curated details on over 489 million global companies, as well as real-time, audit-proof details through a network of direct connections to commercial registers in more than 200 countries.
Now, our client has a configurable data solution that can be used to support onboarding and perpetual KYC as part of client lifecycle management in an automated way, fully integrated into its workflows, feeding into master data management. Moody’s is contributing to “Golden Records” for the bank’s customers, which can be accessed by different departments and divisions across the business who also want to make better, data-driven decisions.
The bank’s KYC and onboarding team is performing a regulatory function with its entity verification process. They are accessing and reconciling valuable data that can be leveraged by other departments, removing silos, augmenting Golden Records, and enabling cleansed data to be used without duplicating effort.
“We are excited to work with this global banking institution to offer entity verification data that underpins its master data management. Moody’s has been chosen due to our ability to deliver Entity Verification on a global scale via a single API. Our solution is flexible, scalable, and offers a perpetual view on counterparty risk for the bank’s KYC and onboarding processes, and beyond.”
Keith Berry
General Manager, Compliance and Third-party Risk Management Solutions
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