Chinese outbound investment is set to reach a staggering USD 2.5tn over the next decade according to the Financial Times – largely the result of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, which lays out ambitious plans to build infrastructure to create a new Silk Road connecting China to the developing world and an estimated 60% of China’s outbound investment is channelled through Hong Kong.
Contribution by Paul Charmatz, Managing Director at encompass
As a consequence, an increasing number of ambitious companies with Chinese Ultimate Beneficial Owners, as well as high-net-worth Chinese individuals, are accessing financial services outside of the country. In tandem, the Chinese government, along with governments globally, have strengthened regulation focused on the prevention of money laundering and financial crime, increasing the need for transparency and the hunger for data on Chinese companies and high-net-worth individuals.
The key to robust and effective Know Your Customer (KYC) is seamless access to comprehensive and accurate data in the KYC discovery process. For this reason, our goal at encompass is to meet customer requirements by forming strong partnerships and integrations with trusted data providers across the globe. One of these new partnerships is with The Wanda Credit Service, a subsidiary of Wanda Group (Wanda), a conglomerate of commercial management, culture, real estate and finance.
Wanda’s high-quality verification services on Chinese entities and individuals provide critical insight to financial institutions with a need to understand the ownership and structures of companies with provenance in China, or to conduct due diligence and identity verification on Chinese individuals. This data now available directly within the encompass platform, or via our advanced API for integration into existing onboarding or core banking systems, for fast and effective KYC.
The role of technology
Even relatively simple KYC cases take several hours to complete using current manual processes, and with both the number and complexity of cases increasing steadily these processes are unsustainable. Financial institutions are now urgently seeking technology solutions to drive efficiency in regulatory compliance and customer onboarding. encompass employs robotic process automation (RPA) to perform data discovery across all of the trusted sources our customers rely on. By returning complete and accurate results, we support our customers’ goals of improving Straight Through Processing (STP) rates, and reducing the overall cost of compliance without compromising quality.
In addition to adding Wanda to our growing network of data providers, we also recently announced our partnership with Wisers, the world’s leading Chinese news information service provider. These partnerships, along with our new office in Hong Kong, ensure we can offer the most relevant solutions to the market, and provide the highest level of support to our growing customer-base of Asian financial institutions.
About Paul Charmatz
Paul is Managing Director at encompass, joining the company in May 2017. He has considerable experience in the business information space particularly with global banks and financial institutions. This includes roles at Dun & Bradstreet where he ran the European sales organisation covering thirteen countries, and was MD of their Benelux business. More recently he was CEO of RM, a compliance data supplier, and SVP for Europe and AsiaPac for Onesource and Head of FS globally. Paul has worked with a number of private equity companies who invested in the businesses he managed, including Union Square, OTPP and GTCR. Paul can be reached at: paulc@encompasscorporation.com
Source: encompass Press Release
