Beneficial Ownership: A Closer Look

In 2021, the Government of Canada released a requirement for reporting entities to obtain beneficial ownership information. Beneficial owners are “individuals who directly or indirectly own or control 25% or more of a corporation or an entity other than a corporation”.

The concealment of beneficial ownership information is a technique for money laundering and terrorist activity financing schemes. 

This issue has been under the limelight ever since the finCEN files were leaked in 2022 and the Pandora Papers leaked in 2021, exposing the corruption of major banks and politicians across the globe. These financial institutions played a crucial role in the movement of illicit funds to these offshore accounts

According to the Information and Privacy Commissioner Ontario (IPC), by obtaining beneficial ownership information, relevant bodies can assess the risks surrounding certain transactions or commercial relationships.  Companies have to now re-evaluate when they carry out Client Due Diligence (CDD) like Know Your Customer (KYC). This helps with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) measures as high-risk clients and transactions can be monitored for suspicious activity.

Updating client information is often manual and distributed to different lines of business.  The KYC group ends up receiving multiple versions of the same base file from different Lines of Business (LoBs) with their relevant information. Collating information is tedious, inefficient, prone to errors, and potential cause for delays and loss in revenue.

However, with TRIYO, updates and approvals can be tracked using the audit trail.  KYC teams can automatically merge updates from the various LoBs to the main tracker once changes are received and approved, allowing everything to be accounted for seamlessly.  Thereby, transforming a laborious and error-prone process into one that’s clean, trackable and efficient.

Learn more about TRIYO here.

TRIYO’s intelligent data platform integrates, aggregates data from all communication channels across an organization and visualizes the data to generate powerful insights into resource utilization, client engagement and process efficiencies.

Our mission is to help organizations to surface and understand the latent data hidden in all communications channels to provide real-time insights into process gaps and to create efficiencies.