Supporting large commercial bank with a Know Your Customer (KYC) review – and fast!

The challenge

Since 2009, we have supported one of the Big 5 UK banks on a range of remediation programmes, complaints, Mortgage QA and Business Assurance. When timeframes were tight and access to customer data limited, the Chief Compliance Officer approached us to help carry out a historic KYC review on the onboarding process of a cadre of commercial customers.

The solution

• We created a team of specialists who knew how to effectively carry out customer contact on CDD/EDD/SOF/SOW and had deep knowledge of Customer Risk Assessments, SARs and Transaction Monitoring.
• The timeframes dedicated that we should provide a level of leadership under the bank’s own governance teams to ensure we hit the milestones at the right time. We worked with the bank to agree how we might create a QA framework or deploy our own QA team.
• We onboarded two teams under our Ops Lead
• We implemented a weekly performance review and the option of flexing up/down on our resource. Both parties recognised that the pace of progress would be hard to determine until we had started the work.

The outcome

The project has been a huge success. The outputs have resulted in some customers being ‘off-boarded’ and we have been asked to review a separate book of customers along the same lines as our initial project. We have retained a number of the team from the first project and they will become the SMEs for the second project. We will then supplement these individuals with specialist technical skills for the second customer cohort.