Thomson Reuters Unveils Managed KYC Service

According to the vendor, the new offering was developed in partnership with financial institutions, corporations, traditional asset managers and hedge funds, following discussions with nine regulators from around the world.

Accelus Org ID provides capital markets firms with a managed service covering the on-boarding of clients, risk categorization, and risk screening, allowing them to more effectively respond to new and ongoing regulatory requirements.

"Over the years, the risk division at Thomson Reuters has built several investment solutions for third-party risk and compliance like World Check, and about a year ago, we started looking at bringing a lot of these services together as a managed service for client on-boarding," explains Jan-Coos Geesink, senior vice-president of Financial Crime and Reputational Risk at Thomson Reuters.

The platform acts as a neutral "central clearing house" by creating identity documentation, which works as a globally-recognized KYC "passport", and provides the ability to screen for high money-laundering risk characteristics, negative news flow, or sanctions issues.

Reduced Duplication
Financial institutions' clients are required to submit a single set of identity documents to Accelus Org ID, which can then be made available to all of their authorized financial institutions.

The platform, designed to integrate with financial institutions' existing internal systems and available in 63 languages, is centrally updated as new regulations come into effect. It covers the rules underpinning the Anti Money Lundering (AML), Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca), Dodd-Frank, European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) regulations.

"About 40 percent of the same entities are being screened and on-boarded by sell-side institutions," Geesink explains. "There is a huge overlap there, so we decided to take out that duplication and help both buy-side and sell-side firms in reducing the costs and speeding up the on-boarding process." 

The platform, based on the acquisition of client on-boarding software  GoldTier last year, is designed to integrate with financial institutions' existing internal systems and is available in 63 languages. It is centrally updated as new regulations come into effect, currently covering the rules underpinning the Anti Money Laundering (AML), Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca), Dodd-Frank, European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) regulations, supporting KYC compliance in the US, Europe, Asia and the emerging markets.

A Product of Participation
Accelus Org ID has, according to Thomson Reuters, been introduced with the participation of a working group, comprising financial services professionals that have assisted in defining and validating the requirements for the management and ongoing distribution of identity data and documents collected as part of the Thomson Reuters service. Tradeweb Markets, an affiliate of Thomson Reuters, helped Thomson Reuters on the KYC front, while Thomson Reuters Transaction Services Ltd, an FCA-regulated provider of electronic FX brokerage services, participated in a beta trial of the service and is now live on Accelus Org ID. 

"As a globally regulated trading business, it is vital that we have absolute faith that we are meeting our KYC regulatory requirements using a secure service," says Phil Weisberg, global head, foreign exchange, Thomson Reuters. "Accelus Org ID supports us with all aspects of KYC needed for our 7,000 member entities, and this will ease the path for our clients to trade and invest with confidence."