A global wealth manager simplifies the application of in-house policies for clients in over 90 countries

The challenge

It was crucial for our client to empower their investment advisors to easily implement existing policies and make smart and compliant investment proposals even in the most complex cross-border scenarios without being slowed down by legal complexity.

Due to the enormous complexity of the investment advisory environment and the high volume of regulatory changes, our client was facing high risk exposure, workflow blockers and increasing costs of individual client processing. There was a need for a solution to simplify the usage of internal policies and compliance requirements and accelerate the decision-making process without further escalation to in-house compliance and risk departments. The overall regulatory dynamic combined with the hurdles of obtaining timely compliance information lead to missed revenue opportunities.

The solution

Apiax digitised and centralised our client’s cross-border regulatory knowledge to deliver clear answers regarding business activities right into the advisory tools of each relationship manager.

Embedded checks, warnings and insights support advisors in offering tailored investment proposals to customers. Requests are mapped to the governing banking licence of the offering banking entity. An underlying legal taxonomy harmonises interpretation of the rules across jurisdictions and ensures consistent mapping to relevant investment products and client information. With all updates automatically reflected in their tools, advisors can make decisions quickly and without escalating to the risk and compliance department.

The project included the following four elements:

• A single source of truth: Reinforce the bank’s infrastructure to consume digital regulatory rules. Establish digital ‘single source of truth’ for regulatory rules which can be accessed via APIs. 
• Digitisation: Continuous digitisation and updates of existing rules across multiple jurisdictions and business units.
• Integration: Integration of digital regulatory answers and automated checks into existing advisory tools and internal processes.
• Governance: Establishing in-house processes for rule maintenance including ownership and technical gatekeeping. At the same time giving full transparency of digital regulatory requirements to internal stakeholders as well as internal and external auditors.

The result

With Apiax’s solution in place, our client аutomates risk mitigation for 90+ countries, secures an 8-fold reduction in compliance breaches and makes 80% less effort for compliance monitoring.

Thanks to the Apiax answers platform, the single source of regulatory truth, delivering instant up-to-date cross-border answers, the bank’s advisors are confident that the service they provide is always compliant. Due to workflow optimisation, they are able to handle 20% more markets with better clarity and unmatched speed. Our client reduces by 90% the effort for internal compliance support for the advisory department, allowing them to focus on strategic and more complex legal tasks.

Maintaining and updating this digital cross-border compliance framework does not require involvement from IT – everything gets done with a simple one-time API integration linked to the Apiax digital rule repository.