In this blog post, we explore the value of digital cross-border country manuals for financial institutions. Digital cross-border country manuals improve on traditional country manuals providing speed and accuracy for even the largest financial institutions.
What are cross-border country manuals?
Cross-border country manuals provide financial institutions that operate internationally and have foreign clients with the knowledge necessary to conduct their cross-border banking activities in compliance with applicable regulations.
Cross-border country manuals detail what is allowed or prohibited and help financial institutions avoid compliance risks when serving foreign clients. They are considered to be a suitable instrument for becoming sufficiently familiar with cross-border risks and for assessing, with reasonable effort, the legal risks that may arise in the respective countries.
From the financial institutions’ perspective, cross-border country manuals provide information on the risks and particularities to be taken into account when conducting business activities in a specific country or when dealing with citizens of a specific country as clients.
What are digital cross-border country manuals?
Digital country manuals enhance existing traditional country manuals. They transform the regulatory know-how contained in cross-border country manuals into scenario-based yes-or-no answers and make this knowledge instantly available to business teams via intuitive user interfaces. Digital cross-border country manuals reduce the time spent on compliance issues so business decisions can be made faster. As a result, they support agility in an increasingly regulated environment.
Let us now look at the 6 most important reasons to move from traditional cross-border country manuals to digital cross-border country manuals:
1. Leverage scenario-based yes-or-no answers
Digital cross-border country manuals provide users with scenario-based yes-or-no answers to restrictions on doing business abroad. A few clicks suffice to get to a result. And they cover myriad business scenarios. Compare this to traditional cross-border country manuals, where static text provides detailed but general information about a country and requires interpretation that slows decision-making.
2. Scale compliance knowledge
Digital cross-border country manuals meet the needs of fast-growing financial institutions. They make it easy to subscribe to new business scenarios and new countries at the click of a button. Because of their ease of use, the number of stakeholders benefiting from digital cross-border country manuals is infinite. This is in contrast to traditional country manuals, where knowledge is hidden and not scalable, and exploring a new jurisdiction means buying a new manual.
3. Get it done in minutes, not hours
With digital cross-border country manuals, it takes less than minutes to get answers to any business activity – even in a complex, multi-party, cross-border scenario. With traditional country manuals, exploring cross-border situations often takes hours, sometimes days.
4. Compare scenarios
Digital cross-border country manuals enable user-friendly comparisons between different cross-border scenarios in a single view. This makes it easy to find out where circumstances best fit a product or service. Paper based cross-border country manuals do not facilitate comparison of scenarios – in any way!
5. Work with up-to-date compliance knowledge
Using digital cross-border country manuals reduces the risk of missing regulatory updates – they are automatically applied to the compliance rules consumed through the interface. Traditional country manuals must be manually updated and distributed each time regulations change.
6. Get answers on instrument level
Digital cross-border country manuals clarify the dos and don’ts not only at the country level, but also at the individual product level. This is a level of complexity that traditional cross-border country manuals simply cannot handle.
In conclusion
Digital cross-border country manuals allow financial institutions to treat cross-border compliance as a competitive advantage. They provide speed, accuracy and synergy throughout even the largest financial institutions.