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Mitigating risks and ensuring regulatory compliance through Nexis Diligence
EVENT COVERAGE: LEXISNEXIS WEBINAR Mitigating risks and ensuring regulatory compliance through Nexis Diligence
Nexis Diligence, from LexisNexis allows organisations to access extensive business intelligence through a convenient single interface to conduct enhanced due diligence and background checks.
As the world faces everincreasing global risks and uncertainties arising from third parties, organisations are compelled, more than ever, to protect their businesses and ensure due diligence is met.
This is especially true within the financial services industry since it has been even more vulnerable to threats of fraud, money laundering, bribery and corruption, as nearly every business accelerated their shift to online transactions when the news of the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
In 2020 alone, it was found that there were over 1,230 fintech apps available in APAC, and marketers have spent US$244m to acquire new users.
Ms. Evangeline Wong, Vice President Asia Pacific Sales of LexisNexis, observes that whilst the digital shift was a blessing for financial institutions (FI) and consumers who were limited in their ability to have face-to-face interactions, it piqued the interest of fraudsters, money launderers, and other cybercriminals looking to take advantage of the digital influx.
“How can companies develop strategic international business relationships while mitigating these bribery and corruption risks? The most important step is to understand the level of risk posed by the third parties your company relies on,” Wong says.
Bribery and money laundering
Around $2.45b fines were issued for bribery under the US Foreign and Corrupt Practice Act in the first half of 2020 alone, with the companies suffering not just from legal and financial penalties, but reputational and strategic damages, as well.
At the same time, that a lot has changed since governments first began to address issues of money laundering. Several key factors have appeared to expedite anti-money laundering (AML) legislation, as the digital age increased the volume and velocity of businesses conducted globally and introduced new means to transfer and exchange money.
These factors have driven AML legislation up the global governmental agenda, leading to all-around efforts to reduce the risk of money laundering.
“From the outside, regulatory requirements are expanding and there is a heightened demand for supply chain transparency to demonstrate environment, social, and governance compliance. From the inside, FIs are trying to reduce costs involved in screening high volumes of entities,” says Wong.
Addressing risk exposures with Nexis Solutions
Banks and FIs, as well as regulators, have formalised screening news articles as a key step in mitigating business risks.
As such, compliance leaders can effectively use adverse news checks as an asset for risk reduction by treating it as an essential due diligence component and executing it efficiently.
The LexisNexis media archive enhances compliance checks for two main reasons. With a news archive that goes back 40+ years, organisations can uncover past risk-related news. LexisNexis aggregates content from 60,000 sources, including global, regional and local news, industry sources and more.
Through its due diligence research platform Nexis Diligence, LexisNexis empowers organisations with access to critical resources that allow them to conduct enhanced due diligence and business background checks including screening against watch lists, over one million politically exposed persons, over a thousand sanctions lists, all from one convenient source.
With its easy user interface, Nexis Diligence also offers access to international court cases to keep organisations informed of ongoing litigation that could disrupt business and to support compliance programs to address anti-bribery regulations.
The Report Builder within Nexis Diligence makes it easy to capture a verifiable audit trail to help demonstrate compliance efforts.
The flexible solution also offers an optional Robotic Process Automation integration of Blue Prism digital workforce within Nexis Diligence, freeing up human resources for highvalue analysis and decision-making.
