BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side compliance product, KYC—SIX

Know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements are becoming more complex and the global sanctions regime is constantly evolving. It can be a challenging landscape to traverse, but slowdowns in the onboarding process can mean a loss of money and increased reputational risk, paid for in the form of hefty fines. With new rules and regulations popping up, SIX, this year’s KYC winner, is working to keep a strong focus on the monitoring of these rules and beneficiary ownership structures in order to provide the right data and alleviate the compliance burden for customers.

Take, for example, US sanctions mandates regarding China and the US. It’s become increasingly difficult to know whether you’re in safe territory or about to step on a sanctions landmine, potentially leading to large fines, reputational damage, and even loss of licenses to transact. To answer the challenge, SIX developed an automated solution, dubbed Sanctioned Securities Monitoring Service (SSMS). It provides customers with an easy-to-digest daily list of issuers and securities linked to the domiciles, companies and individuals sanctioned by the UN, EU, US, UK, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Singapore and the Hong Kong Sanctions Regime. The list eliminates the need to source, scrub and map data while minimizing the risk of large fines and reputational damage. In July, SIX launched an offshoot of SSMS that is focused on identifying securities connected to Marijuana Related Business (MRB), and has already identified and listed over 100,000 connected securities.

This year SIX also partnered with SimCorp to deliver global sanctions data directly into the Compliance Module of the SimCorp Dimension platform, streamlining efforts to source, validate and align sanctions data with existing portfolio data.