In its press release, EFA stated that it understands how sophisticated financial crime has become over the years and how regulators have demanded that the financial industry mounts a correspondingly sophisticated and determined response. Regulators are supervising their charges more frequently and take enforcement action more readily and with greater penalties. Their message is clear: comply vigorously, and be ready to demonstrate compliance in detail, even if one has delegated the performance of one's obligations to another supervised entity.
In these circumstances, regulatory compliance comes first. In order to provide a service to clients' satisfaction, EFA is integrating i-Hub's customer due diligence (AML/KYC) technology into its business, to give its clients the confidence that they comply fully with AML/KYC laws at all times, and to ensure that everyone in their business – retail or institutional investors, compliance or risk officers, fund or management company directors, auditors – receives timely service and reporting to the best market standards.
i-Hub was conceived and built in Luxembourg to serve the needs of the international banking and investment fund industries. Working together, EFA and i-Hub have defined a set of APIs that allow EFA to manage all aspects of customer due diligence within the i-Hub application: collecting and storing client documentation; digitising key data and automatically configuring shareholder record-keeping systems and name screening and transaction checking tools, and much more.
Noel Fessey, EFA CEO, said "Our design embeds i-Hub into our business in a way that ensures that data and documents are updated at every step in our customer service process. This improves the client experience and our efficiency, and allows us to demonstrate compliance at any instant by query on live production systems. In the first implementation, we have focussed on core process. In the next phase, we will work with i-Hub to deliver direct access to our fund companies and management companies, so that they have full transparency of their data at any time. Next year we will introduce individual investor self-service. We're very pleased with how we and i-Hub have combined our strengths to deploy this powerful technology."
Pascal Morosini, i-Hub CEO, said "We are delighted to partner with EFA, and to extend iHub's capabilities to serve the international fund service industry. Our design is very well matched to the requirements of fund promoters, fund boards and management companies and their administration agents, and can support a full range of service models and fund distribution modes."
i-Hub (i-Hub S.A.) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of POST Luxembourg servicing Professionals subject to AML laws.
