The following article was distributed by globalcustody.net on 20 September 2016.
The global rollout of the globe-spanning ID Register system continues in London later this week, following its launch in Jersey and Guernsey on Tuesday and Thursday of last week.
The initiative, led by the Channel Islands-based private equity fund administration specialist Ipes, is aimed at enabling investment intermediaries to comply with FATCA and know your customer regulation in a simple and cost-efficient way. Ipes Director Tim Andrews will be blazing a charm offensive trail with the international specialist press through London as part of the drive to increase awareness of and take-up by investors around the world.
The arguments behind the creation of ID Register are well rehearsed. In essence, notes Tim Andrews, every institution involved in financial services must comply with the requirements of the FATCA and know your customer regulations, a key part of the fight against tax evasion, money laundering and the sponsorship of terrorism. This demands the multi-jurisdictional collection, distribution and analysis of data on literally an industrial scale, with which the traditional manual processes developed in more innocent times simply cannot cope.
“The need is there for the ID Register,” says Tim Andrews, likening it to LinkedIn and other forms of social media for the financial services community. “Regulatory support is there, and in the days of Web 2.0 the technology is there to take a process that has been creaking at the seams well and truly into the 21st century, eliminating the duplication that asking investment houses and banks the same questions several times on different occasions would otherwise have entailed.”
Using ID Register is, almost as a bonus, relatively simple. “It has to be intuitive, and our figures show that it is,” says Tim Andrews. “Of 8,500 investors in funds that we approached to comply with FATCA, five-sixths responded and completed the relevant forms online. We believe we are the only administrator in Europe to have adopted this approach rather than use paper. We are further convinced that others in the industry will see that it reduces the cost of publishing and reading KYC, FATCA and other information and appreciate the benefits of publishing a single profile that is connected to everyone and can be used all round the world.”
