Thomson Reuters, the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced significant enhancements to enable organizations globally to better meet their regulatory obligations.
Investments in new World-Check Risk Intelligence resources, the integration of GoldTier client on-boarding software, and additional services offerings will help its growing global customer base in financial services and multi-national corporate comply with their Know Your Customer (KYC) regulatory obligations.
During 2012 the US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added 561 entities to their sanctions list. Of these 181 were already profiled in Thomson Reuters World-Check Risk Intelligence database ensuring that the 5,000+ organizations using World-Check, including 49 of the top 50 banks, had risk indicators months ahead of the OFAC listing.
Importantly, in the past 12 months Thomson Reuters has also further invested in expanded research capabilities to enhance and maintain the World-Check database. A significant increase in research capacity has provided over 400,000 hours of research by a team that consists of native speakers of over 60 languages monitoring in excess of 400 sanction, watch and regulatory enforcement lists and more than 240 countries and territories. Expert research teams focus on topics such as: Politically Exposed Persons, State Owned Enterprises, National and International Sanctions, Narrative Sanctions, Law and Regulatory Enforcement, Negative News, Financial Crime, Maritime & Vessel, Regional Organized Crime, Global Terrorism and Insurgency, Chinese Organized Crime, and Middle East. All research is underpinned by specialist quality assurance teams.
In response to regulatory and customer demands for an enhanced Know Your Customer (KYC) on-boarding service, Thomson Reuters also recently launched Accelus Screening Resolution Service (SRS). SRS utilizes Thomson Reuters unique blend of research, software and expertise to provide an outsourced risk screening service powered by Thomson Reuters assets such as World-Check Risk Intelligence, Screening Online Software, Country-Check research and IntegraScreen Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD), managed by a specialist team of research analysts. The service helps customers, both in financial services and the wider corporate market, achieve fast review of new and existing clients and a lower overall cost of operation with strong quality assurance processes that provide a complete audit trail for regulators.
In addition to the new SRS service, Thomson Reuters has announced it will be integrating GoldTier Client On-Boarding software into its offering, providing the financial service sector with a new end-to-end client on-boarding service that extends from the front to back office - increasing efficiency and consistency and reducing costs. The Goldtier framework integrates policy, process, documents and data management into a common platform.
Integrating Thomson Reuters existing solutions such as content from World-Check, IntegraScreen Enhanced Due Diligence reports and software platforms for ongoing screening and monitoring of clients, with GoldTier's broader KYC compliance platform, will add significant value to clients and offer them an even more powerful solution that is aligned to the way they work and regulators' expectations.
"The due diligence burden placed on firms requiring them to know more about their customers, not only at the on-boarding stage but also during the life of the customer relationship, has rapidly increased in recent times." said, Mark Schlageter, managing director, Governance, Risk & Compliance, Thomson Reuters. "Thomson Reuters existing anti-money laundering, anti-corruption, FATCA and KYC products and services are used as point solutions by our clients' operations teams to conduct risk screening and customer due diligence for anti-money laundering and sanction compliance as a key part of anti-corruption programs and most recently for new tax compliance legislation such as FATCA. With the onset of additional legislation the industry is looking for a more comprehensive KYC solution that covers the additional due diligence requirements and reduces cost without introducing regulatory risk.
"The integration of GoldTier's broader KYC compliance platform will add significant value to our customers and offer them a more powerful solution that is closely aligned to the way they work. It will also allow Thomson Reuters to accelerate its strategy to bring new KYC managed service offerings to market around this best-in-class solution."
Thomson Reuters Accelus helps organizations understand and comply with the increasing volume of regulations they are subject to. It helps firms manage their business more effectively - on both a strategic and an operational level - by providing the intelligence and tools they need to make informed business decisions based on risk and opportunity. It does this through a unique combination of regulatory and risk content, taxonomy and configurable workflow technology that connects governance, risk and compliance processes across the organization in a holistic and integrated way.
Thomson Reuters has been named as 'Best of Breed' in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant™ for Anti-Money Laundering Solutions; a category leader in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant™ For Operational Risk Management Systems; category leader in the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant™ for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Systems and has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in its Leaders Quadrant of the "Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms Magic Quadrant." Thomson Reuters was also named as Operational Risk Software Provider of the Year Award in the Operational Risk and Regulation Awards 2013.