How best to approach a Current Customer Review project

Deciding upon the best approach to undertake the Current Customer Review project will depend upon:

• the portfolio of customers and the levels of potential risk they pose

• the number of customers

• the money laundering practices currently employed

• the budgets available

Different approaches

A single approach across all customers, is a possibility, for example:

Manual contact – you could decide to manually contact individual customers to confirm their identity. However, the cost of such an exercise would be very high indeed and the time taken to cover all customers would be extensive.

Electronic identification – use of electronic data sources to confirm the identity of individual customers is another method. This exercise could be undertaken relatively quickly. However two factors must be considered; does the data approach used enable you to conduct sufficient depth of identification to comply with the requirements for high risk customers, and is it likely that a data approach can identify 100% of your customers.

A multi-dimensional approach
The pragmatic approach is likely to contain both manual contact and the use of electronic data matching. It is probable that an electronic method will be used first of all with manual contact strategies employed to identify those customers who were not electronically identified.

For efficiency the use of electronic data for identification is both lower in cost and faster than manual contact.