Steven Goldstein

Many large financial institutions currently have multiple onboarding teams and numerous reference data silos. In addition to simply being inefficient, this creates all sorts of other challenges:

A. processes differ between departments exposing regulatory, credit and counterparty risk;

B. communication between different parts of a firm about clients and counterparties is difficult;

C. upselling and cross-selling is difficult;

D. multiple, independent data silos lead to all sorts of errors.


This isn’t easy to fix. Onboarding data turns into reference data, and reference data changes all the time. Changes to reference data should be sent back to the compliance team, mainly to understand how the client or counterparty’s risk may have been changed. I’m going to show some data that illustrates why this is so important.

• KYC and Reference Data are Converging

• Reference data changes all the time; this effects risk levels

• Increased regulatory pressure to get this right

• What should be done?