Interview between Banking CIO Outlook and Dominic Suszek, President and CEO of Global RADAR®.
Q. What sense do you get of the challenges financial institutions face now and how is Global RADAR effectively addressing them?
A. The current issues revolve around client data and how information can be stored, accessed, analyzed and enhanced to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. The hurdles faced can be summarized as weak client data on legacy profiles. This has led to significant rise in fines and costs associated to increased staffing. Organizations are required to have a thorough understanding of clients and their transactions and having processes in place to detect if the two don’t add up. We’ve identified that the cornerstone of an effective compliance program is customer due diligence.
As a leader in this market, we’ve has been addressing this basic requirements by providing a Customer Due Diligence solution to address the re-profile requirements for existing clients while serving as a tool to simplify the data capture process for new clients.
Q. Can you give us more insights into how your software reduces costs and enhances compliance?
A. A big part of how our software reduces costs is in the efficiency of our automation when onboarding clients. For example, the average cost to set up and maintain a new account is more than $325 per year; manual, and paper-based can cost up to 20 times more than computer-assisted, electronic document processing. Also, with Global RADAR’s risk rating process, you’re able to quickly identify high, moderate or low risk clients, allowing you to prioritize your review processes, increasing staff productivity significantly. While these are both for hard dollar savings. The biggest cost reduction of course comes from the prevention of fines. There has been over $7 billion in fines assessed over the last two years for non-compliance with anti-money laundering regulations.
Q. Elaborate your software’s core competencies like Client Onboarding and Risk Rating, and Transaction Surveillance.
A. As a leader in this market, our goal has been driven by the four pillars of an effective compliance program. Our core competency, the Customer Due Diligence pillar has been the cornerstone of Global RADAR® from the beginning and the solution has evolved to include the additional pillars, Document Management, Watch List Screening and Transaction Surveillance. We’ve identified that all four are critical components of an effective compliance program.
Q. Even the most competent of organizations tend to face market competition. What are the strategies employed by Global RADAR to thwart this competition, and what according to you, are the company’s key differentiating factors?
A. We simply want to be the best solution available to all financial service providers, from banks to broker dealers to investment advisors. There are several specific aspects of Global RADAR® that set us apart. We give clients the benefit of an automated workflow. This improves the customer experience by reducing cost and time wasted during the new client onboarding process. With our system, information obtained can be utilized for cross selling products and services in real time.
We understand that every organization is different, and we pride ourselves on offering the most personally tailored experience to meet the specific needs of every single one. Our competitors don’t provide this functionality and, often times, it ends up saving a lot of time and frustration. System enhancements are easily incorporated without having to wait months or even years to see them. Global RADAR® was created by bankers for bankers, so we have definite insight into the pain points that bankers experience and have developed this solution to address these points.
Q. What are some of the investments Global RADAR has made for innovations? Could you give us an inside view of what goes on in your innovation lab?
A. Global RADAR® has spent the last ten years perfecting a solution to meet the evolving requirements of organizations and their regulators globally. We work closely with seasoned highly qualified professionals from various regulatory and law enforcement agencies along with banks and broker dealers of all sizes from various markets to ensure we grow and continue to adapt to the requirements of an expanding regulatory landscape.
Q. Tell us more about your clientele and where Global RADAR assisted one of its clients to curb their business challenges, while delivering incremental enhancements.
A. With a presence from Malaysia to Switzerland and from Canada to Buenos Aries, the sun never sets on our clients. We are fortunate to be a solution of choice for markets such as Malaysia, the US, Canada, the Caribbean, Central and South America as well as Europe. Many of our clients implemented Global RADAR® to prepare for or as the result of an examination. When dealing with clients around the world, while the regulatory landscape is relatively constant, the oversight authorities and their enforcement differ significantly. This is one of the reasons we have maintained our ability to be nimble and to be able to provide self-configurable customized options that are available on demand.
Q. The name Global RADAR, is there an interesting story behind its coinage? Global RADAR® was originally called BSA RADAR®.
A. Because of our extensive expansion into the global market place, we found it necessary to replace the initials “BSA” which is a very US-centric regulation with “Global”. This demonstrated our desire to ensure we met the needs and requirements of financial service providers and regulators around the world. Also, as part of our evolution into the global market place, we’ve not only changed the name, but software operates in Spanish, French and Portuguese.
Q. If you (CEO) were to give an analogy between any of your personal traits/hobbies and your thought leadership and the way you manage the company, what would that be?
A. Perseverance and insight, those would be the qualities that I believe best describe my personal traits. As a professional whose career has spanned over thirty years of experience in the financial services sector, I have been at the very foundation of change and growth in this industry. Recalling my days of as a teller when I started in banking, through my own introduction into technology as the industry matured and accepted change, the banking sector has undergone its greatest growth and hardest challenges during the last three decades. These changes have included significant developments in regulatory oversight. Having been a part of this history has allowed me to share personal insights and set a vision for the future, and Global RADAR® has thrived because of it.
Q. What is Global RADAR’s next big step to advance forward in the industry in terms of technology? Please elaborate on any upcoming product/plan or geographic expansion.
A. While there has been significant growth in many corners of the world, there are still many sectors that are in their infancy. Oversight by regulators and their enforcement of legislations globally will steadily continue to grow and this will remain a key factor in the direction we take as Global RADAR® continues to grow. In addition to the changing enforcement landscape, we will continue to evolve to provide a solution which can be utilized in sectors such as cryptocurrencies.
Q. Is there anything more you would like to add or highlight? Any other interesting insight you would like us to talk about in the story that we may have missed in this questionnaire?
A. Global RADAR® is a solution that was born from the necessity to create a solution that would address regulatory requirements while providing operational efficiencies large core systems could not provide. I frequently tell people that Global RADAR® was created to be the solution I would have loved to have as a banker when I had to work through all these issues.
