encompass, the only provider of simultaneous, real-time access to multiple sources of global company and person data, today announced a new reseller partnership in Japan with Nikkei Media Marketing (Nikkei MM), strategic information partner to companies and organisations.

Regulatory activity in Japan is increasing following the introduction of the Act on Prevention of Criminal Proceeds in 2016, and in the run up to the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) planned Mutual Evaluation in 2019. Amongst other anti-money laundering (AML) measures, the Criminal Proceeds Act set out new standards for regulated firms for customer onboarding and monitoring, including Know Your Customer, Customer Due Diligence and Enhanced Due Diligence, following earlier criticism from FATF on the government’s approach to AML.

These enhanced requirements mean firms are spending increasing amounts of time and money on gathering the data required to perform KYC. As a manual process, information and news discovery for KYC can take several hours per case, but by robotically automating this process encompass reduces that to minutes.

“The increasing regulatory burden faced by Japan’s banks and other regulated firms is driving the need for innovative technology solutions to streamline the Know Your Customer process,” says Paul Charmatz, encompass Managing Director, “We’re delighted to partner with a company as well-known and respected as Nikkei Media Marketing to bring our innovative robotic process automation technology to the Japanese market”.

“In a more stringent regulatory environment we are seeing increased demand for solutions that can drive efficiency in compliance operations,” commented Nikkei Media Marketing CEO, Yutaka Omura, “For this reason, we are excited about the possibilities for the encompass technology in Japan, and to drive sales of the solution in the market”.