Howard Wimpory of Encompass

Wimpory spoke to FinTech Intel to discuss the benefits of implementing a perpetual know your customer model

Howard Wimpory, know your customer (KYC) transformation director at Encompass, spoke to FinTech Intel to discuss the benefits of implementing a perpetual know your customer model.  

As the current KYC model takes time and resources, Wimpory believes that with the new perpetual model, banks can ease this process, and protect themselves and their customers more effectively from financial crime.  

Can you tell me about Encompass?

Encompass enables banks and financial institutions to deliver revenue faster, drive operational efficiency and demonstrate consistent compliance with dynamic KYC process automation.  

Its award-winning platform, data connections and industry expertise help clients to create and maintain real-time digital risk profiles of everyone they do business with. 

What is your role at the company?

As KYC transformation director, I work with our global banking clients to help them navigate digital transformation of their KYC processes and get the best out of the Encompass platform.  

This involves understanding the challenges that customers are facing operationally, gained through four decades of operational management experience, and guiding them on the journey of utilising KYC process automation to meet these challenges in a way that is most beneficial to them. 

What are the differences and benefits between KYC and pKYC?

The speed at which changes to clients’ risk profiles are identified. The original KYC model refreshes the client profile at intervals of between one and five years, depending on a once-in-time risk assessment.  

pKYC monitors data sets for changes in near real-time, allowing detected material changes to be investigated and appropriately responded to. 

Can you talk more about the outdated processes and why they don’t work anymore?

The constraints of the current (manual) model are that it lacks flexibility and scalability, so it’s inflexible to changing demand.  

That inflexibility creates persistent operational problems, backlogs, poor quality, slow risk identification and a poor role proposition for the analysts.  

How will the new technology solve these problems?

Automation brings inherent flexibility to respond to changing demands.  It addresses the problem of quality by coding the required standards into the rulesets.  

Through APIs, the technology components integrate with each other to create a seamless process flow, eliminating transposition errors and handoffs.  

How will this new technology impact banks and fintechs and how they work together?

I think we will continue to see collaboration between them, and strategic partnerships where fintechs deliver solutions to problems banks face, but banks will recognise that the speed, agility and singular focus of a regtech provides a better, more sustainable solution to certain problems than a bank could create themselves. 

Image: Encompass Corporation 

Josh Poyser Josh Poyser is an editor at FinTech Intel. He has written about fintech for several years and appeared at FinTech Connect 2023 on the 'Unlocking Success: The Art of Fintech PR' panel.