Accenture has introduced a “compliance as a service” (CaaS) offering for financial institutions, fintech and technology companies to combat financial crime and remain compliant with current regulations.

Accenture estimates that financial services firms globally will spend 4 percent of total revenues, on average, on compliance-related activities, with that figure expected to rise to 10 percent by 2021.

Earlier this year, the firm released SynOps, an artificial intelligence-enabled platform that gleans information from its own client engagements to identify opportunities for improving business processes. Accenture’s new compliance offering uses SynOps to help its clients manage the scope and complexity of the regulatory and compliance environment.

Accenture’s CaaS service offers the following features:

• Know your customer (KYC): Tools and capabilities that help businesses verify the identity of clients and assess their suitability, along with the potential risk of illegal intentions in a business relationship;
• Anti-money laundering (AML): Measures to enable low- and high-risk customers to comply with AML regulations, including transaction monitoring and alert management;
• Compliance and controls testing, combined with governance, analytics and continuous reporting;
• Contract lifecycle management, improved by transformational technologies, process and data strategies for London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) contracts; and
• Privacy data management, to help data practices keep pace with changing privacy regulations.

“Today’s compliance officers need to be agile and transform from reactive to strategic in an increasingly complex environment,” said Bob Bradley, who leads the CaaS offering for Accenture Operations, in a statement. “Although the cost of compliance continues to rise, compliance budgets remain stagnant. By moving compliance-related functions to a flexible operating model, our comprehensive offering will enable clients to manage risk with efficiency and speed, freeing them up to focus on higher value-added opportunities as part of their journey to intelligent operations.”

Accenture’s CaaS offering was recently recognized in Everest Group’s “2020 Financial Crime and Compliance Operations PEAK Matrix assessment.”