Regulation:
How Xapien facilitates enhanced due diligence at scale-up Griffin
“Thanks to Xapien, enhanced due diligence on the directors of prospect companies and suppliers has gone from a resource-intensive one-day process to detailed evidence-based reports in under 12 minutes. The time savings are colossal.”
Alex Nash, Money Laundering Reporting Officer, Griffin
Key results
- Due diligence investigations were reduced from an average of one day to 12 minutes for data gathering, allowing the compliance team to analyse and give an all clear, or not, within the hour.
- The sales team views compliance as an enabler that equips them with an in-depth understanding of prospects. Prospects are onboarded faster
- Reduced customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- 23 new suppliers onboarded in one year, this may not have been possible using manual research processes.
- Griffin can be confident they are doing good business. They have a better understanding of clients and ensure their suppliers support their wider values.
Background
Griffin is making the bank you can build on. The company is developing an API-first, full-stack Banking as a Service platform that lets fintechs focus on building products for their customers, not managing back-end infrastructure and compliance operations. Griffin is currently seeking authorisation to become a bank with the PRA (Prudential Regulation Authority) and the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority).
The challenge
As a banking as a service (BaaS) provider where compliance is a key offering, it is vital that Griffin’s clients and suppliers are good actors. However, using search engines to carry out enhanced due diligence tasks like adverse media screening on prospects and combing sanctions lists is a resource-heavy task. This takes a minimum of one day per prospect (often longer) and is a major time drain for a rapidly scaling business, where every minute counts.
Even so, effective due diligence has to be efficiently done without holding up the first line business team and slowing down business growth. When prospects are in ‘buying mode’, they are likely considering multiple options. Due diligence is a really important step that doesn’t have to cause friction or delays for customers. Faster response times help to enhance the overall customer experience.
Griffin cannot onboard a prospect or supplier until due diligence has been concluded fully. In the event that negative information or risks that show the prospect is unsuitable are discovered, the time invested would have been wasted by both Griffin and the customer and Griffin’s reputation will be damaged.
Before Xapien
- As a rapidly scaling, VC-backed startup, Griffin has ambitious growth targets. New prospects and suppliers are being evaluated and onboarded all the time, but due diligence takes time.
- Due diligence takes at least a day, which means a limited number of prospects can be evaluated.
- There is a potential for customers to feel friction during the onboarding process as compliance need time to look into prospects and uncover tangible evidence when they have a concern that something is wrong.
- Proving that due diligence has been conducted using search engine history is time intensive and error prone.
The solution
With Xapien’s automated research platform, compliance can complete due diligence research within an hour. The sales team at Griffin can go into meetings equipped with an in-depth understanding of the prospect, confident that a red flag should not emerge after they have started working with a prospect customer. This creates positive relationships between the first line business development team and second line compliance team.
“In a scaling startup, the time of our expert teams is a key resource. Spending a whole day reviewing one prospect is inefficient and unsustainable.”
Alex Nash, Money Laundering Reporting Officer, Griffin
As soon as a prospect or supplier is mentioned, their name is run through Xapien. Inputting the search terms takes 30 seconds. Compliance can leave the software to run while they get on with other tasks. The results are available in 12 minutes or less. Compliance takes half an hour to read the results. Direct risks are highlighted, so compliance can skip the irrelevant information.
“Searching the internet is a robot’s job. Our job is to mitigate risk and loss in the long term for the business. All I need to provide is a name to get the majority of the information I need about a prospect’s history, connections and reputation. I can then confidently state that there are no red flags (or there are) in a matter of minutes.”
Alex Nash, Money Laundering Reporting Officer, Griffin
Xapien’s neural risk classifier can understand the meaning of words, allowing it to distinguish between genuine risks and non-risks and reduce the margin of error (irrelevant information) significantly. Previously, this had to be done manually, with compliance experts carefully reading through every article about the prospect to determine relevance.
Xapien provides clear evidence of a due diligence process
With Xapien, Griffin has been able to quickly understand which customers fall outside of its risk appetite. This allowed Griffin to avoid endangering its reputation and wasting the time of its teams and potential customers. Xapien also allows Griffin to download, store and periodically update results on the businesses it is reviewing. This functionality ensures that there is a clear trail of evidence available that shows due diligence has been carried out.
“I cannot overstate how much easier due diligence is with Xapien. Enhanced due diligence on a prospect used to take the better part of a day. You can sometimes go down a rabbit hole of searches and reviewing news stories to try to determine whether they are proven, hearsay or media speculation. Xapien enables us to get all of that data in 12 minutes or less. Now, I can leave Xapien running in the background while attending to other compliance needs.”
Alex Nash, Money Laundering Reporting Officer, Griffin
AI insights, straight to your inbox
Stop searching.
Start knowing.
Search engines are great but they are only the starting point. Finding, reading and condensing the full picture is slow, hard, and painstaking work. Xapien can help.