Waters Rankings 2022: Best AML compliance solution provider—Acuity Knowledge Partners

Overview

Entering business relationships with individuals or organizations without fully knowing their past and present business dealings can expose firms to lawsuits and regulatory fines. One of the biggest challenges is running know-your-customer/anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) checks on customers, suppliers or investments to assess the financial crimes risk they pose before dealing with them. Acuity’s due diligence reports aim to reduce this risk.

The Solution

Acuity leverages two decades of research to deliver a customized KYC report that addresses specific needs involved in managing third-party risks. Its team of KYC/AML experts use its proprietary Epic (extract, populate, investigate, calculate risk) due diligence research methodology, customized risk ratings, and remedial measures to provide insightful reports.

Secret Sauce 

Acuity differentiators include: 

• Analytical and risk-based decisions
• Quick turnaround​ 
• Focus on quality 
• Scope of coverage. Some of the areas that its reports focus on include: customer profiles, beneficial ownership, key personnel, state-owned/political exposure, sanctions and watch lists, adverse media, and source of wealth and funds.

Recent Milestones

• Bespoke solutions for onboarding, remediation and ongoing monitoring (trigger-based and periodic)
• Performing deeper investigations—Acuity’s analysts draw on relevant public and open-source information available to highlight any potential risks
• Developed and implemented its proprietary risk-rating methodologies, country risk rating, and source-of-wealth questionnaires 

Future Objectives 

• Integrating multiple data sources for collating adverse news information
• Leveraging new technology (such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural-language processing) for identification of risk from unstructured data sources
• Multi-language reporting