encompass corporation: Spearheading the KYC-AML Automation Movement

The compliance landscape has become more stringent than ever. With the ever-increasing instances of fraud and money laundering, it is inevitably for the greater good that regulatory bodies are breathing down the throats of financial instructions when it comes to addressing KYC requirements. In the case of banks, for example, information submitted directly by their corporate clients is no longer considered as a valid KYC resource. As such, for entities pertaining to financial and legal services verticals—where KYC mandates are of utmost importance given that reputation and revenue are at stake—fulfilling the same has become a rather herculean task. “Companies need to get through a series of steps to gather information from sources around the world, analyze, and run the information through screening steps, gather adverse news on their clients, and finally bring that all together to make a risk assessment before they can partner with their clients. This can also drastically affect the time for client onboarding. Not to mention, the steeping cost factors associated with the process,” says Wayne Johnson, the CEO of encompass corporation, a leading provider of end-to-end KYC automation services.

encompass comes as a silver bullet to address the looming predicaments associated with adherence to KYC policies. The company brings in powerful process automation capabilities to enable organizations to easily align information from trusted sources in tune with their KYC policies.

encompass prides itself on its partnership with industry-leading data providers across the globe. After all, the quality of data is a crucial factor to meet the demands of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) regulations. The encompass solution stack brings to the analyst’s fingertips, adverse news, business and credit data, information from electronic ID, official registries, and industry regulators. The solution leverages AI to enable organizations to make sense of vast layers of unstructured information easily. Be it a multinational company or a startup SME—often the hardest candidate among the lot, to fish out information from—encompass, has it all rounded, and can scale to profile any number of clients. The scalability edge that encompass offers is of particular value when it comes to implementing newer KYC policies across existing client base, which would otherwise turn out to be a huge pain point.

The ease of integration and use is another huge differentiating factor for the encompass stack, which can be appended to existing systems via API or a web interface. Consolidating client data and proof documents, getting to know the whereabouts of shareholders alongside information about their extended relations, capturing audit trails, and obtaining real-time policy progress can be achieved by mere “drags and drops” of the mouse pointer. Furthermore, adverse news instance can be seamlessly linked. Even the whole organizational hierarchy can be visually plotted and scrutinized wherein “color-coded” risk patterns are marked. encompass thus brings KYC and risk assessment to a whole new level, one that embraces speed and guarantees safety for organizations, and imparts transparency into inspections of regulatory authorities. In comparison, organizations can achieve in minutes, what would otherwise have taken them hours or even days for manual research.

Johnson co-founded encompass in Australia during 2012, with Roger Carson, the company’s global financial sales director when, back in the day, the duo found that one of the ventures they supported had criminal ties. They realized the market’s need for a clarity imparting, quicker-result yielding KYC infrastructure. Today, encompass has a strong foothold in the Eurasian region and has expanded its office into multiple locations in the UK. “Our product is always driven by what our customers need. We bring innovations based on the understanding of the business problem that they are facing,” concludes Johnson.