Clearbell Reduces Investor Onboarding Time by 90% with Vespia’s AML Compliance Solution
With Sophie Burrows, Investor Relations & Communications Manager at Clearbell
Clearbell is a UK privately-owned real estate fund management and advisory business whose mission is to invest in and advise on various scopes of real estate projects across the UK. Covering everything from active asset management to developing properties across all real estate sectors.
Clearbell receives investments from insurance companies and pension funds from different parts of the globe. This means that as an AML-obligated entity Clearbell is required to perform KYB and KYC checks on the investors that they onboard.
This was a perfect opportunity for collaboration between Clearbell and Vespia.
Clearbell came to us with a challenge to provide them with a modern user-friendly onboarding experience. However, since they are operating in a more traditional environment with investors being used to filling in paperwork by hand, the flow had to be intuitive, trustworthy, and most importantly, fully AML compliant.
Clearbell’s AML Compliance team must evaluate every investor with a risk-based approach in-house. Before Vespia, the team performed time-consuming KYB and KYC checks manually.
All in all, the back-and-forth emailing, document research, filling in the AML questionnaires, waiting, Sanctions and PEP screenings, and business register checks - it took Clearbell up to 2 months on average to onboard just one investor.
After exploring some available providers on the market, Clearbell found the solution they were looking for in Vespia.
Clearbell opted for the Vespia Onboarding Flow which includes the following features:
Vespia offers Clearbell a fast and secure investor onboarding while delivering powerful anti-fraud protection and ensuring full compliance with all required AML regulations of the EU and UK.
One of the essential features Vespia offers Clearbell is the capability to regulate verification levels on a case-by-case basis and create distinct verification flows for different types of funds and investors.
Customized verification flows are paramount for the business, and Vespia's flexible AML compliance solution lets the team manage different investors according to their needs.
Vespia's solution offered the client regular support and data storage to provide a thorough audit trail to appease regulators.
The implementation took 2 months (1 week of implementation, and 5 weeks to hit the roadmap milestones for features).
Thanks to the Clearbell use case, Vespia launched AML questionnaire 2.0, which now allows our customers to not only change the AML questions but also create several versions of the questionnaire for different company types.
Every next company that will come to Vespia wanting the AML questionnaire 2.0 will take only 1 week to implement.
The back-and-forth emails were replaced by the Vespia Onboarding Flow, which is designed to help Clearbell get a more in-depth verification process, as it involves the company itself in the verification process from the very beginning.
The onboarding time per investor got reduced from 2 months down to 5 days. The intuitive Vespia Onboarding Flow allows investors to include all of their company details and AML answers without spending days and weeks collecting the information, downloading, scanning, and filling in forms.
Clearbell is now able to concentrate on its core job and leave the AML verification and onboarding to Vespia.
Interested in hearing more? Talk to our experts and get a demo.
