The Seven Friction Points in Digital Customer Onboarding and What Compliance Teams Can Do About Them

Digital customer onboarding was supposed to be the part of financial services that got easier as technology matured. In many respects it has:- the branch visit that is no longer mandatory, identity documents that can be verified remotely, and a customer who can be onboarded in minutes under the right conditions. Yet for every institution […]

Deepfakes, Document Fraud and Digital Identities: The Real Risks of Video KYC

Video-based Customer Identification Process (V-CIP) has fundamentally transformed customer onboarding in India’s banking and financial services industry. Introduced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and subsequently adopted by other financial sector regulators, V-CIP enables regulated entities to establish customer identity remotely while providing a level of assurance comparable to face-to-face onboarding, provided prescribed controls […]

Structuring, Layering and Integration: How Transaction Monitoring Catches Each Stage of Money Laundering

A note on terminology The FATF canon describes three stages of money laundering: placement, layering and integration. Structuring is not a fourth stage. It is the dominant technique by which placement is executed, and in a digitised economy it has largely displaced the suitcase of cash. Treating structuring as the operational face of placement is […]

When Sanctions Screening Breaks Down: Matching, Vendors, Governance and What Goes Wrong

Having the right lists is only half the problem. The other half: the half that generates regulatory penalties, correspondent banking consequences and reputational damage is whether the screening programme actually works when it needs to. Most sanctions screening failures are not caused by institutions that didn’t know the obligation existed. They are caused by institutions […]