FinTrU’s Technology Journey: Combining People and Product

Published: XXXX XXXX

FinTrU stands for Financial Transparent Utility, aiming to revolutionise risk and compliance processes in financial institutions. For over a decade, FinTrU has excelled in providing exceptional services, working alongside operations teams in prestigious banks to support KYC, AML, Risk, and Legal Due Diligence. Committed to both quality and efficiency, FinTrU proves these values can coexist harmoniously.

But FinTrU is changing. In 2021 we embarked on transforming ourselves into a Technology-Enabled Solutions company. With rapid advancements in AI, Machine Learning, RPA and other readily available cloud-based technologies, we understood that the desire from financial services institutions to simply outsource their operational challenges to third parties was unlikely to continue forever. Indeed, we don’t believe that it should. So we began to lay the groundwork for a different style of offering to our clients. One that combines a hybrid of people plus technology to ensure that we continue to deliver the outcome our clients need, not just a Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) software license.  

Deciding how best to proceed was never going to be easy. There are many elements to a traditional Client Lifecycle Management process in banking, and every institution does things slightly differently. Team structures can vary, responsibilities can be divided up in subtly different ways, and there can be unique approaches even to similar clients and product types. Our choice really came down to whether we developed a complete, holistic solution to all CLM challenges, as others have tried, or to develop solutions to individual problems in the ecosystem. We opted for the latter, and for good reason.  

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The challenge with CLM Holistic solutions

Holistic solutions CLM can be quite good. You get solutions to all, or most, of your challenges inside one box and you only need to work with a single vendor to get them to work. However, there are often some drawbacks that also need to be considered.

• Comprehensive Excellence: for a solution to truly be holistic, it needs to excel in every aspect of your process. This is a significant challenge.
  
  
• Customisation Needs: you’ll inevitably want to tailor the solution to meet your specific business processes and requirements. This can be difficult or require extensive configuration and maintenance from your internal technology teams.
  
  
• Future Challenges: extensive customisation can lead to future challenges with upgrades and ongoing maintenance.
  
  
• High Costs: holistic solutions are usually quite expensive.
  
  
• Long Implementation Time: they often take a long time to get implemented and integrated with other systems.
  
  
• Significant Commitment: these solutions require a substantial commitment of time, people, and budget.
  
  
• Phase 2 Myth: large-scale investment projects often have mythical “Phase 2s” that never materialise, leaving many manual processes in place.

FinTrU CLM Approach

Every software business has the same problem – you're only as good as the data you can plug into. For KYC, we started by addressing how the data could be improved.

FinTrU started with two areas in mind: data quality and data lineage.

If we could improve not only what data was collected and fed into upstream systems but also improve the audit trail of where that data came from and when, then upstream processes for our clients would improve as well. This would also allow us to then continue to develop better solutions for those upstream processes.  

We began by looking at how data was collected by banks. This includes collection from the public domain and from the bank’s customers. We chose to initially focus on the Capital Markets domain and zoned in on KYC as a first use case. KYC represents a significant part of our services business, and so we knew that most of the industry still had plenty of reliance on human processing. This led us to develop two core products, which simplify and improve the quality of their respective processes:

1. Client Outreach – an email-based case management tool that enables analysts to correspond with the bank's customers for the purpose of collecting documentation and input to KYC (and other regulatory) processes.  Client Outreach reduces human error, speeds up analyst processing time and doesn’t place additional restrictions on the bank's customers to log into something new.

2. TrU Label – an AI-based Intelligent Document Processing solution that automates the extraction of KYC data from large, complex, unstructured documents. TrU Label uses proprietary Machine Learning models to speed up information extraction tasks from large and complex documents, improving quality through consistency of human-readable output as well as creating rock-solid audit trails and upstream-friendly data files.