Compliance as a Service (CaaS) is coming to WORBLI with Agenix. The pairing claims they will offer significant time and cost reductions for companies building financially compliant products.
“CaaS is another great solution that we’re offering for businesses that are looking to build faster and more secure fintech applications. It’s about automating a complex process and creating a secure, inexpensive, and accessible path for developers who are looking to overcome some of these new regulatory hurdles,” Sean Anderson WORBLI Vice President of Commercial Relations.
The need for CaaS
With recent announcements around compliance requirements coming from leading regulators FinCEN and FATF, it is becoming increasingly more difficult, time-consuming and expensive to build financial products – and remain within the guidelines put forth from these regulators. Companies that ignore the strict rules around operating as a Money Service Business (MSB), AML/KYC, and corporate Know Your Business (KYB) risk serious fines and penalties.
In parallel, building and maintaining a compliance framework:
- typically costs hundreds of thousands of dollars
- likely requires additional staff
- demands months of research and implementation.
Agenix and WORBLI seek to help applications on the WORBLI network ease that friction. Their approach: add a new toolset to manage compliance in an application from ground up.
The WORBLI/Agenix CaaS offering
WORBLI is an enterprise-grade blockchain platform. It proposes to offer CaaS through a strategic partnership with Agenix (itself a grouping of WORBLI team members). The objective is to to help companies navigate increasingly difficult regulatory requirements by:
- providing key services around financial compliance and risk management
- reducing development time and costs for companies looking to operate within mandatory regulations.
The CaaS product will bring the latest compliance tools and automation to the WORBLI ecosystem, thereby enabling development organisations to concentrate on building their products. Services will include:
- a risk-based approach with AML program consulting and compliance reviews
- guidance around regulator’s requirements and licensing
- GDPR compliant Transactional monitoring services
- automated submission of SAR reports
- other reporting and services.
“Compliance is a headache for every company, especially those operating in the finance sector. Our Compliance as a Service will dramatically reduce costs surrounding this, allowing a new wave of innovators to enter the space, who wouldn’t have been able to before. We’ve essentially removed a significant barrier to entry for a lot of entrepreneurs.” – Domenic Thomas, WORBLI CEO.
Enterprise Times: what does this mean
The CaaS services envisioned by WORBLI/Agenix will make use of the *aaS approach, by including regular updates around changing compliance requirements. This makes sense: doing it in one place for many customers/clients is superior than each customer/client having to do it for themselves. Equally, suggesting optimisation plans for existing compliance programs that customers might already have in place also makes sense.
Nevertheless, while intrigued, Enterprise Times remains skeptical. There is:
- a dearth of detail
- no listing of (or web site for) the Agenix participants
- no evidence regarding the compliance competence of those participants
- little about how – in practice – customers/clients will ‘operate’ with CaaS.
According to a WORBLI Medium post “Applications will benefit from pooled AML transactional price tiers offered by Agenix while taking advantage of free AML/KYC user registration and ongoing AML checks against watchlists provided by the WORBLI foundation. This ensures complete and holistic adherence to all of the new regulatory specifications without the steep learning curve. It is estimated that implementing CaaS can save the average application $250-$500K and 6 months of development time.”
Enterprise Times would like to see evidence to back this up. Indeed one wonders if WORBLI launched CaaS prematurely.
