Accenture’s new offering helps financial institutions combat financial crime and comply with regulations

Accenture has introduced a compliance-as-a-service offering to help financial institutions, fintech and technology companies cost-effectively combat financial crime and comply with related regulations.

Navigating the regulations that combat financial crime can be very expensive, and financial institutions have incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for failing to prevent parties from disguising illegally obtained funds as legitimate income.

It is estimated that financial services firms globally will spend 4% of total revenues, on average, on compliance-related activities, with that figure expected to rise to 10% by 2021.

Accenture’s compliance-as-a-service (CaaS) offering provides an end-to-end capability that leverages SynOps — Accenture’s human-machine operating “engine” that synergizes data, applied intelligence, digital technologies and exceptional talent — to help financial institutions manage the scope and complexity of the ever-changing regulatory and compliance environment.

Designed to serve the compliance departments of banks, insurers, capital markets and other organizations, the CaaS offering —which expands Accenture’s managed service capabilities — delivers a variety of comprehensive managed services, including:

• Know Your Customer (KYC): Tools and capabilities that help businesses verify the identity of clients and assess their suitability, along with the potential risk of illegal intentions in a business relationship. One large bank using this capability reduced case processing times by 15% and significantly reduced false positives.
• Anti-Money Laundering (AML): Intensive measures to enable low- and high-risk customers to comply with AML regulations, including transaction monitoring and alert management. For example, newly fortified AML controls recently helped a large bank achieve quality ratings greater than 95% and eliminate future quality assurance backlogs.
• Compliance and controls testing, combined with governance, analytics and continuous reporting.
• Contract lifecycle management, improved by transformational technologies, process and data strategies for London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) contracts.
• Privacy data management, to ensure data practices keep pace with changing privacy regulations.

“Today’s compliance officers need to be agile and transform from reactive to strategic in an increasingly complex environment,” said Bob Bradley, who leads the CaaS offering for Accenture Operations.

“Although the cost of compliance continues to rise, compliance budgets remain stagnant. By moving compliance-related functions to a flexible operating model, our comprehensive offering will enable clients to manage risk with efficiency and speed, freeing them up to focus on higher value-added opportunities as part of their journey to intelligent operations.”

Steve Culp, a senior managing director at Accenture and head of the company’s Finance & Risk practice, said, “In addition to facing intense cost-pressure, compliance functions must also find talent with the full array of required skills needed to thrive in this new compliance environment, making technology-centered approaches essential.

“This new offering helps compliance employees enhance their skillsets, improve their productivity, and contend with emerging challenges such as data privacy.”