Improving KYC and AML at La Mondiale
The story of La Mondiale’s shift from manual to digital workflows, leading to fully integrated client lifecycle management.
About La Mondiale
La Mondiale Europartner is a Luxembourg-based savings and pensions solutions provider. As a part of the French AG2R La Mondiale Group, the business specializes in international asset management and private clients.
Challenge: moving from manual to digital workflows
Like many other insurance firms, La Mondiale Europartner faces increasing regulatory constraints, which drives the industry to continuously adapt to new standards and requirements. La Mondiale was looking for a way to measure and evaluate their compliance with current requirements, without the deployment of additional resources or time-consuming paper-based procedures. Improving the quality of the vast quantities of collected data and increasing the frequency of data updates were also top priorities.
“Some of our previous workflows relied heavily on classic email chains, with attachments or links to shared drives, to pass tasks along,” explains Pascal Bughin, Director of Transformation, IT and Digital at La Mondiale. “This approach lacked cross-departmental coordination, leaving gaps in our ability as a financial institution to effectively combat money-laundering.”
Solution: integrated customer lifecycle management
The Luxembourg-focused KYC Manager tool, powered by the Harmoney platform, reshapes the way La Mondiale manages its clients throughout their entire lifecycle. “The platform enables us to streamline the management of KYC processes, files and datasets, ensuring we meet our broad compliance obligations,” says Bughin. “In addition, this intelligent and automated KYC solution has allowed us to establish a fully digital workflow that connects all stakeholders, including our compliance team, insurance brokers and end customers. It creates a unified, comprehensive client profile. This helps us not only to mitigate fraud and improve our AML efforts, but also makes our processes paperless and more efficient.”
Modules used
Discover more about our modules.
M.01 Identification and validation
Harmoney facilitates a smooth identification process to onboard or reboard private individuals as well as more complex legal entities and trusts.
Conceived for an omnichannel environment, it leverages pre-filled information from internal and external databases, with the end client able to digitally confirm or make modifications to the pre-filled datapoints and documents via an intuitive workflow. The process can be configured to meet the financial institution’s particular needs.
For private individuals, worldwide ID checking can be added to the configuration to give greater reassurance on fraud detection. The confirmed data and documents can then be instantly and efficiently transferred via the API Gateway to the financial institution’s systems, with no loss of data quality.
M.03 UBO verification and confirmation
In an ideal world, external databases would be 100% reliable. But, the reality is that a time-stamped confirmation by the end client is the only way to be confident about data quality.
With pre-filled information, legal entities can be invited to digitally confirm or modify UBO-related information.
Legal entity managers can also easily initiate workflows in parallel to collect relevant data or proof of ID of these UBOs, reducing the administrative burden. Fraud detection services for ID documents can be included for reassurance and to meet regulatory requirements.
Digitally signed confirmation timestamps provide a clear audit trail and can automatically generate triggers for future frictionless client outreach if reconfirmation is part of your client lifecycle management processes.
With Harmoney, the UBO confirmation process, often perceived as tedious and cumbersome, is rendered simple and straightforward.
M.06 AML, PEP, sanction, embargo and adverse media screening
Whether it’s in the onboarding acceptance process or as part of client lifecycle management, Harmoney caters for automated screening. Screening providers such as LexisNexis, Refinitiv, and Dow Jones are already integrated within the Harmoney solution. Financial institutions can keep their screening providers of choice and Harmoney easily links to them via an integration layer.
This brings all the benefits of integrating the Harmoney solution while maintaining risk screening continuity, with features such as ‘fuzzy matching’. Detailed reports on ‘hits’ can be automatically generated and linked to the private individuals or legal entities concerned. In many cases, institution-specific blacklists are also included in the automated screening.
M.08 Case management and continuous risk monitoring
Harmoney has been built to provide financial institutions with an all-encompassing client lifecycle management tool. Continuous risk screening and monitoring, including AML, PEP, and adverse media, can be organised at a frequency to suit your risk policy, and adapted to whether the risk profile is low, medium, or high.
Continuous screening can provide extra reassurance as well as process efficiency.
The potential hits arising from continuous screening can trigger additional workflow such as collecting further digital information from the client via the Harmoney client outreach module with a subsequent new risk assessment and compliance decision.
Unfortunately, continuous screening exercises can sometimes generate a significant number of false positives. The Harmoney platform has built-in intelligence to manage this phenomenon while staying in control of the risks, thus reducing the workload of the compliance and commercial teams.
M.12 Reporting and analytics
Rigorous reporting is crucial in providing insights at client, contract, and portfolio level. To enhance operational management and the customer experience, data can be generated to analyse and monitor processes and customer behaviours, as well as how efficiency can be improved among teams of employees.
All data stored in Harmoney can be made available through reporting. Dashboards displaying a specified range of metrics in the Harmoney application facilitate work process effectiveness.
Outcome: more time for high-value client support
The move from manual to digital workflows has marked a significant change for La Mondiale, improving operations management in numerous ways. Bughin elaborates: “Digital KYC and paperless workflows with automated data collection, validation and updates have drastically reduced the time our employees have to spend on manual tasks. This, in turn, empowers our team members to focus on work that adds value for our clients. Secondly, we’re able to drive even greater value via an agile and collaborative platform that ensures our compliance processes do not only meet current regulations, but also adapt to future legislative changes.”
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