In twenty years of working with financial crime teams, there’s one problem I’ve seen more than any other:
Firms struggling to answer seemingly simple questions about their clients.
For example, ‘How many clients do we have?’ sounds like the simplest question, but many banks can’t answer it due to poor data.
Why is it so hard?
In commercial banking, complexity is the norm - hierarchies, legal entity structures, international groups and so on. Some connections are obvious from public data; others, like personal associations, aren’t. Cross-border firms face even bigger challenges. The result is inconsistent, unclear, and often inaccessible client data.
New regulations add to the problem. In one case I remember where a new rule meant a critical legal document had to be on file, one firm’s onboarding team had no idea which clients had it or how it was stored. No one had ever needed to standardise its filing or naming convention previously so the related data points had not been captured.
Sanctions are another example. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, firms had to scramble to answer: What’s our exposure? Very few had the data at their fingertips.
And these problems aren’t limited to risk and compliance.
Function heads signing off budgets need to know: How efficient are we? How many cases can we handle with fewer people? What happens if we add 10,000 new clients?
New business opportunities bring still more questions, for example: If we were to add this number of new clients to our book, what impact would that have on operations?
