BIBA 2025: Inside the action - FullCircl’s key takeaways for a “New Era” of insurance industry growth

Challenges for compliance and risk officers in the finance sector are mounting, with the continued economic and geopolitical turmoil feeding a huge increase in regulatory requirements.

They also face a tough test in keeping up with changes to the sustainability landscape, employment law, and ongoing market disruptions.

We explore the six of the most pressing issues keeping compliance and risk officers awake at night.

Challenge 1: Mounting sanctions

Perhaps the most pressing challenge for compliance officers is another package of sanctions against Russian companies and individuals introduced in February. Complying with sanctions is extremely complex as it involves searching for often elusive information about companies and individuals worldwide and piecing together an intricate web of associations.

But the UK regulator continues to take a tough approach to breaches relating to sanctions or anti-money laundering (AML), and has already issued several multi-million pound fines against banks in 2023.

The compliance industry is responding with a concerted drive towards digitising and automating sanctions and AML activities. To remain competitive, finance firms need to keep investing in these solutions to increase efficiency and improve risk management.

Challenge 2: Mounting economic pressures

Ongoing political and economic pressures, rampant inflation, and war in Ukraine continue to increase complexity and volume of work for compliance and risk professionals. When these pressures will ease is uncertain.

In addition to sanctions, the 2022 UK Economic Crime Act is creating another huge compliance burden by strengthening anti-money laundering and law enforcement powers, and reforming Companies House. Banks must follow these regulations closely or risk huge fines.

Challenge 3: ESG and vulnerable customers

Risk and Compliance Officers are also challenged with managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk in strategy, credit decisions, risk management and reporting. The regulator is increasingly holding firms accountable for their ambitious ESG claims - such as around net zero greenhouse gas emission targets - and handing out significant fines for breaches. This tough approach will likely continue as the regulator looks to introduce anti-greenwashing rules in June 2023.

As double-digit inflation continues, the regulator also expects financial firms to support their vulnerable customers, and treat them fairly through the cost-of-living crisis. This will be a critical challenge for Compliance Officers as the government starts withdrawing some of its financial help for individuals.

Challenge 4: Cyberattack

Bank of England research shows 74% of respondents deemed a cyberattack to be the highest risk to the financial sector.

Since the start of the Ukraine invasion, there has also been a 81% increase in attacks. Ransomware, a type of malware, is repeatedly mentioned as the biggest threat, and other common types include phishing, advanced persistent threats (APTs), insider action, and denial of service attacks.

Alarmingly, only 48% of financial firms have a formal cybersecurity strategy, according to government figures.

The impact of a cyber attack can be devastating, so compliance and risk professionals need to keep focusing on strong cybersecurity across their businesses.

Challenge 5: Employment laws

There are potential compliance challenges in several upcoming updates to employment laws. Employers will need to proactively comply with the following laws…

• The Carers Leave Bill will create a statutory entitlement to carers leave.
• The Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill aims to expand existing flexible working rights
• The Fertility Treatment (Employment Rights) Bill will require employers to allow employees to take time off from work for fertility treatment appointments
• The Protection From Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Bill will give greater protection to employees from the moment they become pregnant.
• The Worker Protection Bill, which will make employers liable if staff experience harassment by a third-party, such as a supplier, client or member of the public.

Challenge 6: Market transformation

The Financial Services and Markets Bill will make wide-ranging changes to financial services regulation. It will implement recommendations from the Future Regulatory Framework Review in light of challenges such as Brexit and climate change.

The bill also seeks to regulate stablecoins, a type of cryptoasset, and protect access to cash.

Although it also aims to reduce some of the burden of EU legislation, the bill contains a wide range of measures that could increase workload and challenges for Compliance Officers in the short term.

How Compliance Officers can combat these challenges

Choosing technology

Finding the right technology partner can help your Risk and Compliance Officers combat these challenges.

To manage the regulatory burden, companies need to be more proactive and shift to digital processes. This includes perpetual offline know your customer (OKYC) - a revolutionary approach that removes reliance on periodic reviews and trigger events to meet compliance commitments.

Furthermore, a customer lifecycle intelligence (CLI) platform can enable companies to build a continuous compliance model that helps accelerate onboarding while reducing risk. This reduces reliance on reactive, error-prone manual compliance processes, which can be overwhelming without automation.

A CLI system enables Compliance Officers to automatically prioritise risky cases for review and direct remediation activity. Improved automation in areas such as referral categories, high-risk transaction identification, money mule management, and complex fraud ring identification helps you reduce false positives and manual referrals.

Frictionless journeys

Using external data intelligence to automate checks also supports a frictionless customer journey. For example, when customers self-declare items such as occupation, you can use social media such as LinkedIn for external identification to mitigate risk and streamline verification.

KYC/AML authentication processes are often fragmented, leading to duplication of data. A CLI platform can address fragmentation by providing a holistic perspective of risk trends and patterns across your portfolio. This allows you to automatically understand the impact of a policy change and identify emerging risks, such as exposure to Russia. It also lets you quickly identify second and third-degree connections for a 360° view of risk.

CLI data sits in a dashboard that is easy to use and interpret. It also uses risk scoring and machine learning to provide extra insights and maximise the value of your data.

How FullCircl can help address the challenges compliance officers face

FullCircl is a compliance game changer that goes beyond standard KYC and AML practices to perpetual OKYC.

It’s a CLI platform that allows you to overlay policies and risk appetite across trigger changes in your customer base. This enables you to prioritise remediation and deliver consistent decisions and efficiencies.

FullCircl’s CLI also uses automated data collection and checks, and connects data points to expose potential risks across networks of people and businesses.

The overall impact is to help you accelerate onboarding; rapidly reduce compliance challenges and financial risk; acquire validated customer data; and drive consistency and transparency. These factors help you increase customer conversion rates, lower cost to acquire, and improve customer profitability.

FullCircl includes an ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) API endpoint to connect the dots, helping you meet regulatory requirements – particularly for sanctions against Russia – and accelerate onboarding. FullCircl can also be enhanced with Premium Data extensions to address risk and compliance challenges in standard pre-onboarding checks. These include adverse director history; HMRC import and export data; international company data; and County Court judgements and legal notices.

Want to revolutionise your risk and compliance management in 2023? Contact FullCircl to discuss your needs.

It’s a sad but true fact. We’ve looked at the numbers from FullCircl, and it proves it. Women aren’t represented at board level across the financial industry. 66% of banking boards are entirely male, and only 25% of life insurance companies have at least one woman on the board. Our industry’s still got a long, long way to go.

Finance is lagging behind other UK businesses. 40% of FTSE 100 firms have at least one woman on their boards, putting the UK second in the international rankings, but only 34% of financial firms have female representation at board level. Is that really good enough?

Our very own Amy Musk doesn’t think so. She thinks there’s room at the top table for even more women. And that we all need to do more to help women in the finance industry overcome the challenges they typically face. We agree.

Amy’s ideas haven’t sprung out of thin air. During her time at CEB (now part of Gartner), while heading DueDil’s customer success operations and now as FullCircl’s VP of growth, she’s spoken to women from across our industry and learned about some of the obstacles hindering women’s progress. And she’s seen the solutions.

Resilience. Confidence. Allyship. They’re what Amy believes will ensure that more and more women in the finance industry will take their rightful seats on boards across the UK.

Diverse boards are about more than quotas and box ticking

Helping more women in the finance industry climb to senior leadership roles isn’t about ticking boxes, or meeting quotas. It’s about ensuring talent finds its rightful place. And the numbers prove that.

FTSE 350 companies with at least one female board member reported an increased EBITDA of between 3% and 5% over a four-year period. Giving talent a chance to lead regardless of gender has real financial implications for businesses - alongside other factors like increased transparency, better accountability and more innovation.

The case for more women on finance industry boards is clear. Let talented women take their place, and success follows. But as clear as the evidence is, the finance industry is still lagging behind other sectors.

The finance sector underperforms on diversity

“As you climb the seniority ladder, diversity decreases and that’s common across all industries, including for women in the finance industry.”

That’s what Amy’s observed over her career, and the data backs her up every step of the way. Dig into the numbers, and you find a consistently large gap between male and female director numbers across geographical regions and industry sectors in the UK.

As we’ve seen, some sectors see bigger gaps - finance among them - but some regional gaps are worse than others too. The highest concentration of female directors is in London, closely followed by south-east England, but as you head towards Northern Ireland or North-East England, the number of women at the board level drops significantly.

Amy has also identified a lack of funding for female-founded companies both in the UK and abroad. Less than 2% of US venture capital funding went to all-female founding teams in 2021, according to Pitchbook.

The difficulty women have in finding funding is always a talking point at any female-focused event. As Amy explains, when you attend events like Google Cloud Women in Fintech and FinServ 2023, you soon see just how obvious the gender gap is.

In a competitive sector, confidence is key

So why is the financial sector lagging behind the FTSE 100? Why do women in the finance industry find it harder to break through to the board level than in others?

The answer, Amy says, is clear. Finance is one of the most competitive industry sectors. Which means that getting ahead is all about maintaining and displaying confidence. Something supported by a process of allyship - finding supporters within your organisation.

“I consistently see women with self-confidence issues and impostor syndrome. That impacts their ability to speak up and volunteer for tasks. Each person is unique and needs different methods to solve these issues. But building allies can help. If you feel like an impostor, speak to others about it – they probably feel the same.”

Impostor syndrome isn’t unique to women. Over 85% of UK employees say they feel inadequate. But women at the executive level believe they experience more self-doubt than their male counterparts.

Overcoming this isn’t a matter of just being more confident. It’s about finding the right support. Experiments by leadership development platform BetterUp showed having just one ally in a team can empower people and reduce the impact of impostor syndrome. If companies can promote ally behaviours, and coach all leaders to create a culture of allyship, then feelings of confidence will increase - meaning more leaders can reach their potential.

Yet according to the CIPD, only 10% of companies currently promote allyship. Fostering this kind of culture in your financial business will instantly give you an edge over 9 out of every 10 of your competitors.

Confidence is also an individual trait. While you should encourage allyship, it’s also important to foster confidence by helping female employees get involved in as many projects as possible early in their career. Finding hidden talents will develop confidence and resilience - both of which will pay off for your business in the long run.

Support women in the finance industry by using the multiplier effect

Cultural shifts are a good starting point, but financial businesses need to do more to close the gender gap. According to a Deloitte article, financial services firms need to take strategic actions in areas such as return-to-office work arrangements; and policies to support hiring, retention and promotion of women. Otherwise, they risk the gap between men and women in leadership roles widening.

Fortunately, there’s one thing businesses can do that’ll help more and more women in the finance industry rise to senior leadership roles.

Promote women to senior leadership roles.

It sounds obvious, but there’s a real factor at play here. For every woman in a company’s C-suite, three more women rise to senior leadership roles. It’s called the multiplier effect.

Female leadership is key here because, as Amy explains, improving diversity starts at the very top.

“The first step is to start communicating about diversity across the organisation to create a culture of openness.”

“Next, create a culture of diversity and inclusion (D&I) with ambitious goals. Then start measuring, for example, how many female candidates you have at applicant, acceptance and retention level; plus other areas such as gender pay gaps. When you have all the available data, start building initiatives to support your goals.”

By seeking out, hiring and promoting talented female candidates, you’ll improve your available talent pool, and begin to redress the gender gap at board level.

But ambitious goals are only part of the solution. You also need to make sure to take into account other pressures on your female employees. Something as seemingly minor as adopting more flexible working practices - as recommended by the CIPD’s Inclusion at Work 2022 report - means you’re more likely to retain talented women who often have to balance work and childcare.

Personnel changes need to be matched by cultural changes

If you’re serious about promoting gender diversity and benefiting from the improvements in performance that come from having more women at the board level, you need to support people at every level.

Your staff, of all genders, need to feel comfortable talking to each other about the common challenges they face. For women, these challenges include issues such as maternity leave, experiencing menopause, gender bias, and pay disparities.

“I'm approaching motherhood,” says Amy. “That's scary as I've been on an upward career trajectory, but now I'm having to take time off. Talking to other women in the finance industry who have navigated maternity leave and returning to work is powerful.”

But it’s not all about helping women talk to women, as Amy explains:

“We also have to empower men to feel comfortable with conversations about issues such as maternity and menopause. We must build understanding that career paths are not always linear, they are squiggly, and that’s okay - it does not necessarily diminish the end goal.”

Creating a supportive atmosphere means you’re more likely to retain female leaders, and to support talented women as they rise to more senior roles. The financial industry needs to progress - with the right initiatives, the right culture, and by building something crucial:

Resilience.

The role of resilience for women in the finance industry

Financial businesses can help encourage greater diversity by supporting women in building resilience - a crucial issue that FullCircl tackled at our Women in Business Event on 25 April 2023.

The event brought together over 50 female leaders to discuss their career journeys and explain how they’ve helped to shape the future of our industry. Guest speaker Amanda Dennis explained how her focus on resilience has shaped her career as a finance leader, inspiring attendees to focus on building greater resilience across their whole teams.

Whatever decisions you take to build resilience in your teams, and to ensure you benefit from female leadership, make sure that you commit to following through with them. That’s a commitment we at FullCircl are proud to make.

The UK faces a skills crisis.  On one side companies are crying out for talent but on the other, the percentage of students accessing quality work experience is dismally low. But one innovative company is trailblazing innovation in the skills-based recruitment market thanks partly to its partnership with FullCircl - that company is Workfinder.

Forward thinking

In 2019, 16-year-old Maitri Panchal and serial entrepreneur Sherry Coutu spotted an opportunity to make it easier for ambitious companies to attract talented young people while developing skills within their own workforce.  By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the platform ensures that companies' workforce matches their needs, allowing them to drive their growth and stay ahead of the competition.

Through its unique approach, Workfinder is helping to create a more efficient and effective job market, connecting the best talent with the best opportunities while simultaneously upskilling the workforce of the future.

Collaboration in action

FullCircl’s API is powering Workfinder’s solution with superior insights on companies and the people behind them - from growth metrics to deep-dive employer intelligence, and wider sector insights –new employers can be onboarded up to 100x faster without an onerous burden of self-declaration, and candidates can access enriched and reliable intelligence about the things that matter most to them when applying for a new opportunity.  This ensures that employers can be assured of more candidates that are not only matched to their needs but genuinely keen to progress - speeding up the time to recruit and improving outcomes for both parties.

“We have total belief in working in an ecosystem and understand that we must have strong partnerships to make the process slick for both candidates and employers.  But more than this, collaboration will ensure we achieve our ambition of becoming a big player in the skills-based recruitment market of the future.  FullCircl is not only a vital part of our infrastructure, allowing us to operate at speed and scale, but also a vital business partner on all counts”, says Michaela.

To find out more about the Workfinder use case and the impact a Customer Lifecycle Intelligence approach is having on the business, its candidates, and the companies it serves take a read of the full case study.

Every FullCircl customer has a unique story, so while you’re there why not check our stories from the likes of Metro Bank, BT Local Business, Santander, WTW, FC Manby Bowdler, Schroders Personal Wealth, or PIB Group, to name but a few.

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Just like their retail peers, commercial banking customers have an expectation for robust, frictionless, customer-centric experiences that are omni and opti-channel. But, in the current environment, they also value the importance of human interaction. Commercial customers desire a trusted advisor as highly as they demand a slick digital experience. They want relationship managers to understand and respond to their unique needs, preferences, and risk profile at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Over three-quarters of SMEs (78%) agree that digital transformation of banking needs to be balanced with a human element. But almost six in ten SMEs (58%) believe that whilst digital transformation of banking has resulted in cost savings for the banks themselves, the customer experience has suffered as a result.

Banks must evolve their business model to meet new societal expectations and engage customers in highly dynamic environments.

So, how to differentiate?

Is digitisation transformation enough?

No, banks should not forget about the personal touch.

The challenge of course, is how to deliver the personal touch at scale, whilst simultaneously having a firm grasp on everything digital and delivering sophisticated, automated processes and always-on solutions.

As our Banking Success Director Lucy Huntley eloquently puts it: “A great personal experience certainly has technology at its heart. Banks need to harness technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning for better decisioning and delivering a personalised experience.”

What does a hybrid solution look like?

Our new report, in association with FinTech Futures, unpacks:

• What the ideal hybrid solution looks like
• How to balance technology and human in practice
• What banks need technology to do
• What technologies need to be involved at each stage of the customer lifecycle experience
• Examples of good technology in practice

Banks can blend digital and human for superior customer experiences. Download our free report now to find out how.

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For Relationship Managers (RMs), the use of CRM technology in banking has become a hot button issue. More and more customer success teams are investigating whether adopting customer relationship management technology can optimise the customer experience, especially in an increasingly digital environment.

The global pandemic has accelerated a decade-long trend towards less human involvement in banking and more reliance on technology - as face-to-face visits with banking professionals are increasingly replaced by online services, chatbots and apps. While this has led to some improvements for customers - such as speedier transactions and 24/7 access - 78% of SMEs agreed that the digital transformation of banking needs to be balanced with a human touch.

It’s all about creating a blended, hybrid approach. One that balances the ease and accessibility of digitisation with the relational benefits of human interaction. An approach that puts customer experience at the centre of everything.

This is an approach that CRM technology can support.

What is a hybrid approach?

While digitisation has provided huge benefits to banks and customers alike, one area has suffered in the race to replace the bank on the high street with the app in your pocket. Customer experience. A staggering 58% of SMEs believe that the digital transformation of banking has caused a drop-off in the quality of service they receive as customers.

A hybrid approach combines digitisation with a human element to offset the challenges of each approach while strengthening the positives.

Better technology lets you leverage data at the most important stages of the customer journey - discovering exactly when customers want automation to streamline the process, and where they’d like genuine human interaction.

This is especially important for high value or complex deals where a reputation manager needs to get a hands-on feel for how a new customer’s business works, and for any unique requirements that will need to be handled.

By blending the smoother onboarding and risk reduction of digital banking with genuine human connection, you can offer the best of both worlds.

Can adopting CRM technology really put the human element back into banking?

The main issue most customers have with digital banking is a feeling that they’re on a computerised conveyor belt. Things happen because computers say so, and there’s no opportunity to stop or to change direction.

Customers want to feel valued, and the banking industry needs to support them with a real human connection. The use of CRM technology supports that human touch, identifying critical stages where a personal call, email or meeting will provide that real feeling of value for the customer.

And because this human element is backed by the benefits of automation, banks can use customer relationship management systems to stand out from the competition with frictionless onboarding journeys.

It’s not just about putting people back into the process. It’s about supporting those people to make life easier for customers at every stage of the journey.

How should RMs use CRM technology to optimise customer experience?

As we found in our report, written in collaboration with FinTech Futures, RMs are making more and more use of CRM technology. RMs now have more work than ever before, often dealing with huge numbers of clients, all of whom expect a more personal service.

The use of CRM tech to track these customers and provide RMs with in-depth information allows for a much deeper personal connection. It’s no longer on an individual RM to remember facts and figures or find time to set meetings and arrange calls - instead, the CRM system collects and leverages customer data to aid RMs.

Instead of digitisation placing customers on a conveyor belt, adopting customer relationship management technology allows banks and RMs to form deeper, more meaningful customer relationships and provide a better, streamlined customer experience.

Adopting customer relationship management technology with FullCircl

FullCircl can help you to adopt a true hybrid approach, providing your customers with the very best of digital and personal banking services. By correctly interpreting and leveraging data, we’ll empower you to make the best use of your expertise and offer a much better customer experience to your key clients.

Download your free copy of the report here.

Alternatively if you have any questions about adopting CRM technology or the services FullCircl can provide, email letstalk@fullcircl.com.

In 2023, regulated businesses are navigating a highly dynamic regulatory landscape. With financial crime and AML failures a key area of focus for FCA enforcement action, a high-functioning due diligence framework has never been more vital to ensuring compliance, whilst supporting growth, innovation and improving the customer experience.

Let’s start with the basics…

What is Customer Due Diligence?

Customer Due Diligence (CDD) is the process of identifying your customers, checking they are exactly who they say they are, and ensuring they are properly risk-assessed before being onboarded. CDD sits at the heart of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) initiatives.

What does Customer Due Diligence look like in practice?

AML requirements in the UK are based on several key Acts including The Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017, The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

In simple terms financial institutions must carry out CDD measures when establishing a new business relationship, undertaking occasional transactions, when it suspects nefarious activity or when it doubts the accuracy or adequacy of customer information. When carrying out CDD measures a regulated business must:

• Verify the customer’s identity
• Identify and verify beneficial ownerships (for business entities)
• Understand the ownership and control structures of a legal person, trust, company, foundation, or other entity
• Assess and obtain information pursuant to the purpose and nature of the business relationship or transaction

The complexity of financial crime remains a huge challenge for businesses. Combined with rapidly evolving geo-political events and sanctions, regulated businesses are increasingly taking a risk-based approach to customer due diligence, moving beyond standard CDD to enhance customer identity assurance.

What is Enhanced Due Diligence?

Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) is an extension of CDD. EDD is a set of measures applied, using a risk-based approach, to investigate potentially high-risk customers or transactions and gather more evidence and detailed intelligence.

High-risk customers might include, for example, those subject to economic sanctions or operating in countries without adequate AML controls, customers with complex ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) structures, companies managed by politically exposed persons (PEPs), or businesses operating in countries with significant levels of corruption, criminal activity or terrorist activity.

EDD provides a greater level of scrutiny of potential business partnerships and highlights risk that cannot be detected by standard customer due diligence checks. EDD measures may include adverse media screening, obtaining additional identifying information, analysing the source of funds, scrutinising Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) and transaction screening.

What is the difference between CDD and EDD?

Essentially, CDD and enhanced due diligence are different levels of background checks. The key difference between CDD and EDD arises as a result of a customer risk assessment. If through a risk-based approach to assessment a customer is deemed to present a normal level of risk, they can go through CDD, however if it’s apparent that they present a higher level of risk, they are required to undergo EDD.

But - and it’s an important but - CDD doesn’t end at the customer verification and onboarding stage.

What is Continuous Due Diligence?

Customer behaviour changes and risk profiles evolve. Continuous due diligence, also referred to as Ongoing Customer Due Diligence (OCDD) or Perpetual Due Diligence (PDD), refers to a risk-based in-life monitoring approach, based upon risk events and triggers and identifying risk patterns, for maintaining KYC/KYB information and monitoring customers for the risks they pose for money laundering and other financial crimes.

EY recently described continuous due diligence as a transformative strategy, beneficial, less burdensome, and less costly for regulated business and their customers. They also stipulated that transformation requires investment in technology and data, including trusted data sources, integrated triggering events, data logic, adverse media screening, and automated updating of customer information.

Ready to go beyond standard due diligence?

Customer Lifecycle Intelligence (CLI) from FullCircl goes way beyond standard due diligence, through the use of automated data collection and execution of critical checks and processes to deliver continuous due diligence. The result being regulated businesses can ensure compliance through proactive risk mitigation – targeting efforts where it is needed in line with their policies and risk appetite.

The ultimate risk-based approach, CLI utilises technology to connect data points that can be used to expose potential risk trends and connections across networks of people and businesses, as well as providing the ability to overlay policy decisioning and risk appetite across trigger changes – generating targeted and actionable events, prioritising remediation to the highest risk activity and delivering consistency of decisioning and efficiency benefits in AML and KYC.

Head over to our Resources Hub for more information about our web app, API, decision engine, and due diligence tools, including specific guidance on UBOs, PEPs and sanctions, adverse director history, CCJs and legal notices.

Get in touch to find out how we can supercharge customer onboarding and due diligence - so you can do Better Business, Faster