While bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have been lackluster for the first half of the year, speakers at a recent S&P Global Market Intelligence “M&A in Focus” webinar suggested that M&A will recover and unleash a wave of pent-up demand again.
For financial institutions (FIs) undertaking a merger or acquisition, the onboarding of customers and the conducting of joint Know Your Customer (KYC) operations have traditionally posed a major challenge to both the acquiring and acquired organizations.
Typically, each institution will have its own KYC process and requirements, making it difficult for operations teams to consolidate the two FIs’ customer data and documentation. Speed of service delivery is essential to ongoing customer relations and customer satisfaction. Yet, no one wants to risk letting critical data slip through the cracks, putting the newly merged organization at risk.
WorkFusion addresses the KYC challenges that take place during bank M&A in our newly released eBook, Easing The KYC Burden During Financial Institution M&A. It’s a valuable read for operations leaders who want to maintain robust KYC both during and following a merger or acquisition.
Spoiler Alert: WorkFusion reveals how your KYC ops team can work with both companies’ customer data without migrating it – essentially leaving it in place.
But, before you reach the game-changing portion of the eBook (KYC M&A best practices), they’re best appreciated by first recognizing the full scope of KYC challenges during bank M&A. The eBook dives into the four core KYC challenges in the context of M&A activity, including:
- Conflicting KYC Processes between FIs
- Poor or inconsistent data quality
- Cumbersome data migration
- Siloed technologies that are difficult to integrate in the KYC process
Each of the four challenges is explained in a business process context as well as a technological context – always in a way that resonates with non-technical and technical operations leaders alike.
Overcoming the “KYC in M&A” challenges
The eBook also introduces you to AI Digital Workers and explains how their unified technology transforms KYC during M&A. Once again, the technology behind each AI Digital Worker is covered at a level sufficient for all operations professionals to grasp. You will gain enough understanding of what’s ‘under the hood’ of AI Digital Workers to recognize how your financial institution can streamline and more effectively manage and mitigate KYC risk during M&A with their help.
Spoiler Alert #2: AI Digital Workers are pre-packaged, pre-taught KYC experts that integrate all the modern technologies that perform end-to-end KYC. They also integrate with humans for the ideal human-AI collaboration experience.
Best practices for KYC in M&A
Since AI Digital Workers make possible an entirely new and streamlined approach to KYC during M&A, WorkFusion has devised a set of three best practices to guide you through a merger or acquisition. It reflects the new reality that you will not need to perform much of the traditional technology integration and manual data consolidation that require far too much time, additional labor, and special IT involvement. The best practices described in the eBook include:
- Uplifting to a single KYC process for both banks’ data
- Virtualizing data consolidation (rather than first painfully aggregating data)
- Ensuring data quality by digitizing the quality control (QC)
Once the challenges and best practices are covered, the eBook provides you with three 2-minute videos in which three KYC Digital Workers – Darryl, Kendrick and Evelyn – explain how they apply their pretraining, AI and ML to handle KYC for any financial institution.
To learn how to best handle KYC during M&A, download the interactive eBook today.
Click here to request a demo of our AI Digital Workers.