Venturing into the rapidly expanding markets of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region represents a strategic move for businesses aiming to broaden their customer base and increase revenue. However, the journey is not without its hurdles. APAC, with its wide variety of languages and complex legal frameworks, poses unique challenges for governance, risk and compliance teams.
In line with global regulations, governments across APAC require companies to conduct comprehensive screening and monitoring of their business partners and customers. This serves to verify their legitimacy, assess their legal standing, and gain insights into their financial behaviours. Encompassing Know Your Business (KYB), Know Your Customer (KYC) and understanding the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) processes, this practice allows organisations to expand their operations safely and in full compliance with local and international regulatory standards.
Balancing compliance and cost
In the absence of these essential checks, companies face the risk of inadvertently associating with fraudulent entities or becoming conduits for unlawful activities. But a strategic approach is required to keep compliance expenses under control.
A recent report by Deloitte on the cost of compliance and regulatory productivity revealed that, in comparison to the spending levels before the financial crisis, retail and corporate banks have seen their operating expenses on compliance activities surge by more than 60%.
One way to elevate efficiency and reduce workloads is to introduce technology that makes KYB, KYC and UBO practices less resource-intensive.
“The advent of emerging technologies, such as advanced analytics, RPA, cognitive computing, and cloud, is enabling the creation of differentiated regulatory technology (RegTech) solutions to help address some of the compliance, regulatory, and risk management needs. These RegTech solutions, powered by emerging technologies, help deliver richer and faster insights, drive efficiencies in compliance processes through automation, reduce costs, and offer foresight into emerging risk issues.” – Deloitte Report on the Future of Regulatory Productivity
The power of a technology-driven approach
Technology plays an indispensable role in streamlining and enhancing the accuracy of KYB, KYC and UBO compliance processes, no matter whether an organisation is operating in one or multiple jurisdictions.
A well-designed solution can swiftly collect and analyse the vast amounts of data needed to accurately identify and verify the identities of customers, business partners and their ultimate beneficial owners. And if this technology grants access to live data from trusted sources, firms can even go as far as to ensure real-time compliance. This can markedly improve the onboarding experience for customers and clients, establishing a solid foundation of trust and integrity in business operations.
Here are several ways in which advanced technology empowers organisations to automate time-consuming processes, reduce workloads, and drive decisions with real-time data on business partners, customers and beneficial owners across the APAC region:
- Live data eliminates blind spots
Technology that connects effortlessly with various trusted sources, like government registries, is key to making screening and verification processes faster and more reliable. By handling vast amounts of data quickly, it prevents the gaps often found in manual data collection and speeds everything up, making onboarding smoother for everyone involved. - AI strengthens UBO search and discovery
Uncovering the real owners of a new corporate client can be a daunting task as these details are often hidden within complex, multi-layered company structures, spanning different countries and legal frameworks. The required data comes in various formats and languages from a wide variety of sources, making the process even more challenging. Many institutions find these obstacles difficult to surmount with their existing systems, leading to a growing backlog of client cases awaiting processing.UBO search technology augmented with AI capabilities can securely tap into, translate and analyse live data from various official records and sources, including unstructured data. Certain tools even enable firms to visually navigate corporate structures, facilitating a comprehensive view and accurate identification of all beneficial owners. - Intelligent automation solves translation challenges
Intelligent Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Asian Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies enable rapid and accurate translation of key documents and data. This is particularly valuable in a complex, multilingual landscape like Asia, which features a wide array of languages and scripts.These technologies facilitate the automation of translation processes, eliminating the need for manual, expensive, and time-consuming character translation.Additionally, the ability to link translations directly to their original sources provides a transparent audit trail, giving businesses confidence in the accuracy and verifiability of their compliance data.
AsiaVerify offers all these advantages and more
AsiaVerify offers a technology solution that provides businesses with the automation and AI benefits discussed above, supporting safe and compliant operations across the Asia-Pacific region.
This innovative technology also grants real-time access to high-quality data, including millions of business and billions of individual records sourced directly from authoritative government sources in targeted countries. This ensures users operate with the most current and accurate data available, facilitating the streamlining and automation of essential compliance tasks.
Clients of AsiaVerify can access comprehensive information in real-time, fully translated into their preferred business language. These include:
- Records for over 344 million companies, including their registration details.
- More than 106 million alerts, encompassing court records, bankruptcy filings, irregularities and other details.
- Records on over 2.9 billion individuals, featuring government IDs, phone numbers, bank cards, watchlists and more.
Unlock the potential of your business in the APAC market with AsiaVerify’s cutting-edge KYB, KYC and UBO solutions.
Schedule a demo or connect with our experts today! Email us at [email protected].
