In September 2021, we attended Money 20/20 in Amsterdam, where our Head of Sales for EMEA, Roy Williamson, gave an interview to Fintech & Finance News about the event, Napier’s solutions and how Napier helps organisations of all sizes comply with financial crime regulations and thrive.
Watch the interview here, or find the summary of his answers below.
What does Napier offer?
Napier delivers a hosted platform for compliance, and we've taken a very different and much more intelligent approach to compliance that looks to automate the compliance process as much as possible.
Automating the compliance process helps to reduce the cost of ownership of delivering compliance, in a time where there is far more pressure from regulators to do more, and more stringent rules and tighter controls are being applied.
We're seeing the effects of these tighter controls from tier one institutions right through the new types of institutions coming to bear - crypto asset firms, payment services provide some of the like. We are working with such a broad spread of clients, ranging from payment services firms, which can be start-up organizations, all the way through to very large, established tier one banks. We’ve learned a lot in our time working with this wide range of clients.
The Napier team has people from industry, both from other compliance vendors and from the financial institutions themselves, so we’re able to use this expertise to apply technology in the best possible – and quickest – way.
Time to value really is the key thing for our clients, as compliance solutions are still major investments they need to make, and often they’re working to a tight regulatory deadline or to go live with a particular product or solution.
Napier covers the whole client lifecycle, and a strength of the platform is that it gives the ability to carry out transaction screening and monitoring that goes beyond the traditional approach and allows for an understanding of client behaviour.
It's one thing look at transactions in isolation, but what is crucial is understanding how that client is behaving differently today, to, say how they were six months ago or a year ago, or even how we expected them to behave when we onboarded them.
We deliver a suite of solutions that really covers the whole spectrum as we help you to onboard clients, making sure that they're not on any sanctions lists, we help you to monitor transactions and behaviour on an ongoing basis; and should there be any suspicious activity, we also help with reporting that to the respective FIU in your jurisdiction.
Does the Napier system adapt as the regulations change?
So, the key thing to note is that compliance systems have historically been very vendor-dependent and highly code-based, where if you need to change something and you need to react to either regulatory changes or evolving financial crime typologies, it’s a case of having to go back to the vendor – a slow process that may well see your organisation be too late to respond.
The approach Napier takes is to put the power and the control in the hands of the clients themselves. So, for example when organisations need new rules put in their systems, they can do it themselves, including testing those rules and bringing them into play through a very controlled process, using their own team and without the need to go back to the vendor.
This marks a massive difference to what's happened historically, and from a solution standpoint, this makes the solution customisable to the client - we deal with bigger institutions, but for the smaller guys who want to grow over time, they benefit from a platform that can grow with them without changing, just evolving. Because we have this managed service platform, we can look after that and take care of the tech, allowing them to focus on their business.
What has the Money 20/20 experience been for you?
I think it's great - firstly, it's great to meet people again, in the flesh and not through the little lens of the camera. That's it. That's the big difference. Now to see that, I think that people are wanting to talk, they want to engage. And that's really refreshing.
There are also lots more new names coming up and it’s a rapidly evolving marketplace. We're seeing lots of good connections happening, not just with potential clients and their own solutions, but also in terms of potential partnerships, because there are so many technologies and FinTechs out there needing to bring compliance as a core part of what they do.
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