Customers today expect to engage their financial institution (“FI”) and manage their finances via their digital device, and prospective customers also increasingly expect to become customers via their digital device. The challenge then to the FI is clear: how to manage the financial crime risks associated with non-face-to face digital engagement effectively?

Following the Wolfsberg Group Guidance on Digital Customer Lifecycle Risk Management (available here) and in collaboration with the Asia Wolfsberg Group, this session will discuss how FIs can establish a reasonable and risk-based set of controls (one of the three Wolfsberg Effectiveness Factors), and within that context, the need to prioritise resources and enhance controls.

Competent authorities recognise increasingly that with the appropriate controls in place, non-face-to-face customer engagement may be a standard, or even a lower-risk engagement channel. This discussion will describe how digital approaches to building and maintaining a holistic customer risk profile, challenge the “added” value of face-to-face engagement for an FI in knowing its customers, and assessing the risk they present of facilitating, or engaging in, financial crime.