Accuity Unveils Next Generation of Assurance Services

News Wire

Accuity, the leading global provider of financial crime compliance solutions, is developing the next generation of assurance services with policy management capability to help compliance professionals respond to increased regulatory scrutiny for transparency, traceability and auditability. The new service will provide compliance leaders with oversight, control and assurance over their screening systems, which will support their agile decision making as well as empower them to address regulators’ questions regarding live and past configuration of their screening filters.

Regulators have made it clear that they expect firms to prove that their monitoring, assessment and governance arrangements meet regulatory requirements. Global banks, in particular, now have to prove that they have acknowledged updates to internal sanction lists (updated every few days), and that all relevant parties within the bank have adopted the correct updates to these lists. Essentially, this drives a need for both the compliance officer and regulators to have a clear line of sight from compliance policy and procedure to implementation within operational systems.

The Accuity assurance services with policy management capability, developed in consultation with customers, will help meet this need to continually update sanction lists and filters as well as a multitude of business rules that differ across their various territories across the globe. It will offer transparency and control in sanction screening, enabling testing of changes in sanctions operations before committing to live production. This will reduce false positive rates that are key performance indicators in banking operations.

Leveraging existing technology, Accuity is simplifying the process for compliance officers, providing them with a dashboard overview of their systems. Through this user friendly interface, snap shots of past system configurations will also be available, facilitating enhanced regulatory auditing and review, and leaving operations teams to focus on their day-to-day activities.

Commenting on the development, Pascal Aerens, Head of Innovation of Accuity said: “In a world where compliance professionals may be held personally liable, it’s vital that they have the tools to pro-actively identify risk and implement updated data. Our new assurance services with policy management capability will address the toughest challenges these people face, keeping up to date with constantly moving sanctions lists, filters and business rules, which come directly from the regulators. In today’s rapidly changing world, supporting agile decision-making and giving control to compliance teams, allowing them to provide assurance to regulators, is really key, and that’s what we are aiming for with these new tools.”

Sophie Lagouanelle, Head of Solutions, Risk and Compliance, Accuity, added: “Our innovation agenda for assurance services was developed in close collaboration with our clients who need more visibility into their screening tools and more control and traceability of the day-to-day updates. Through a system of notifications, all relevant parties within a bank’s compliance and operations function now know they have adhered to the rules stipulated by the regulator, and the regulators are happy that changes to sanctions lists are recognised and implemented.”