The challenge of Ultimate Beneficial Owner verification
For many organisations, getting to the detail of Ultimate Beneficial Ownership is not straightforward. Typically, many compliance technology firms provide complex corporate webs that map out all the companies associated with an individual.
The corporate web diagrams can often be confusing to navigate and can take hours or days to manually unravel and identify attributes (confirming self-certified information such as company name, address, registration details) and verify those attributes (such as ownership levels and financial reports), and understand where if necessary, to conduct Enhanced Due Diligence.
After listening to our clients, we decided to simplify the Ultimate Beneficial Ownership and identification process.
Simplify UBO verification with NorthRow
NorthRow’s new Ultimate Beneficial Owner Identification tool delves into the complex ownership structure of your target organisation and returns a simple table containing the person(s) that you are required to screen. No more unnecessary or complicated corporate webs. Just the information you need to determine the risk to decide whether it is safe to onboard your business client or not.
This can be returned as an add-on to a standard check-in a new tab on the UI or can be returned via our new API. This can be returned as an add-on to a standard check in a new tab on the UI or can be returned via our new API. In both cases, the UBO service also makes performing additional checks on these individuals a streamlined process by simplifying existing workflow and can also be combined with RemoteVerify.
Remote verification of Ultimate Beneficial Owners
NorthRow’s RemoteVerify solution allows you to onboard Ultimate Beneficial Owners and company directors anywhere in the world, at any time. Our market-leading self-service solutions enable Ultimate Beneficial Owners or company Directors to verify their identity using a progressive web app. The progressive web app will then take the user through the steps of Identity verification, document verification, liveness checks and address verification, streamlining your business onboarding process. See below the 5 key steps for fast, robust and compliant business onboarding experiences.
Added step: Ongoing Monitoring of UBOs
When your UBO onboarding journey is successful, your business client is automatically added to our ongoing monitoring solution which alerts you to any change in your client’s risk profile.
A strong RegTech partner to deliver a changing approach to UBO management
NorthRow recognises that managing UBOs creates a headache for regulated businesses. It’s not only time consuming and expensive, but also has a detrimental impact on delivering KYC/KYB onboarding for new customers and monitoring existing clients.
To overcome these challenges NorthRow have developed and integrated a robust automated process and additional workflow to its API-driven platform, to enable faster onboarding and robust due diligence for UBO management.
The UBO service works by utilising an additional field, providing a shortcut to the top-level company in the group structure, regardless of how long the chain is. Once the service is enabled on a profile, the UBO identification service will run whenever a company check on that profile is performed.
The user does not need to enter any additional information, or select anything, prior to each check. Once the check is submitted, it will go into a waiting state/RAG whilst a second call is made, if needed. With results provided in real-time the system can be customised to meet the businesses individual appetite for risk.
Eliminate the norm to focus on the unusual
The difference with the NorthRow platform is that it offers a holistic view of the process of automating data collection, storage and integration for easy information retrieval. This approach is one of the key elements to making UBO due diligence faster, more efficient and more reliable. By eliminating those checks that are easy to deliver, the platform will only flag the cases that require further manual investigation.
The powerful API pulls data from various sources, to create full company hierarchy structures or to hold traceability references back to the original source. By using the NorthRow platform to perform KYC onboarding, UBO monitoring and event-driven remediation, you can significantly reduce the time, cost and risk involved in your customer due diligence activities. This approach also enhances the customer experience and demonstrates robust compliance to regulators through a detailed audit trail.
By definition, criminals do not comply with the law, so there will always be a requirement for some manual intervention. But the NorthRow approach is about identifying those that require the enhanced due diligence, rather than applying the manual process to all cases. It is only in the circumstances where there is a flag that the compliance officers’ skills and knowledge must be applied.
If you would like to learn more about Simplifying Beneficial Ownership with NorthRow then get in touch to find out more about our powerful UBO identification tool.
