ZA Bank selects Accuity to meet compliance requirements
In an announcement made by ZA Bank - Hong Kong’s first virtual bank - and Accuity, the two companies have announced a joint partnership to meet compliance requirements and improve customer experiences.
Accuity is a global provider of financial crime screening, payments and counterparty know your customer (KYC) solutions. As part of the partnership, ZA Bank has implemented the company’s screening solution to improve its customer experiences, while also meeting domestic and international regulatory requirements.
Currently in Hong Kong under its regulatory and supervisory framework, banks have to regularly demonstrate a robust risk and compliance screening system that can alert the bank to individuals that could be engaged in financial crime, associated with sanctioned regions or entities, or are politically exposed persons (PEPs), to prevent the use of a bank for illicit activities.
With exceptional customer experience being a core focus of ZA Bank, it has to ensure that its risk and compliance screening system can cope with the need to filter in real-time against a variety of rapidly changing regulations and sanction lists, without disrupting the flow of finance or generating unnecessary and overwhelming amounts of extra work. More importantly, the bank needs to maintain a high level of efficiency when handling account openings, loan applications and payments.
"While ZA Bank provides around-the-clock, innovative services purely through a mobile application, we have adopted a rigorous compliance and risk management approach like the traditional banks do. Accuity has been a valuable partner in our endeavour to make banking accessible to more people in our community through technology. By handling growing numbers of customers and transactions with high levels of accuracy, their Firco screening solution has not only helped us meet the AML and KYC-related requirements, it has played a key role in upholding our dedication to excellence,” commented Rockson Hsu, CEO, ZA Bank.
By utilising Accuity’s Firco screening solutions, the bank reports that it has achieved a balance between rigorous risk management and providing excellent customer experience. Accuity’s solution operationalises: automated alert detection, reduction of false positive alerts, and prioritisation of high-risk alerts.
The solution also allows ZA Bank to generate electronic audit trails that can be shared with auditors and regulators.
"The competitive edge for digital banks is primarily through customer experience and lower operational costs. Accuity is proud to be supporting ZA Bank's innovative business model, as well as Hong Kong's advancement into the era of smart banking. The success of this implementation is a strong validation of our reliable and flexible solutions to constantly address new industry needs and standards, such as extensive due diligence, preventing financial crime, and enabling fast, scalable, and frictionless user experiences,” Bharath Vellore, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Accuity.
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