Knowing who owns or controls a company (the beneficial owner) is important for ensuring full compliance with the provision in the Anti-Money Laundering Act.
Tietoevry and T-rank have had digital solutions for identifying beneficial owners of Norwegian companies for more than 10 years. Having a good solution in place is essential for everyone required to ensure full compliance with the Anti-Money Laundering Act, such as banks, finance companies, insurance companies, estate agents, accountancy firms, auditors and lawyer. Companies with reporting obligations invest considerable resources in their AML/KYC activities, and sound data services provide substantial efficiency gains.
Most Norwegian providers of services related to beneficial ownership do so based solely on data from the Norwegian Tax Administration's Shareholder Register. This means that Norwegian companies with foreign owners are not automatically obliged to enter information regarding ownership.
- "For more than 10 years, Data Services and T-rank have provided solutions for revealing beneficial ownership in the banks' customer population in close cooperation with Tietoevry Banking. We’re seeing an increasing focus on good data services in the fight against financial crime from all segments in which entities with reporting obligations operate. By combining structured and unstructured data sets with new technology and the best expert models, we are now building a Nordic data service that uses data elements from our entire service portfolio. The first step is to establish a Nordic solution for beneficial ownership and a visual shareholder map. This will be one of several new offerings we will be launching in the course of 2023, and we've really been looking forward to showing what we've been working on for the past year," says Ole J Jonassen, Sales Director, Tietoevry Industry & Lead Data Services for Banking Tietoevry.
Tietoevry and T-rank are now launching an improved service in which we also include Swedish, Danish and Finnish ownership data in our calculation base. This means that Norwegian companies with Nordic owners will be able to enter who ultimately owns or controls the companies. The same applies to Nordic companies outside Norway with Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, or Swedish owners. The Nordic ownership data are now included in the basis for beneficial ownership calculation that is presented in online entries in an onboarding and/or investigative phase, as well as in our solutions for ongoing account management.
In addition to the Shareholder Register, Tietoevry and T-rank have implemented Norwegian ownership data from Euronext, VPS (Norwegian Central Securities Depository) and dCompany. These provide continually updated shareholder data on the companies with the most frequent changes of ownership.
The expanded calculation basis with Nordic ownership data means that we are simultaneously launching a Nordic solution for the popular Shareholder Map service. This gives a visual presentation of, among other things, ownership structure, board composition and roles, and a beneficial owners map.
- "These measures raise the quality and reduce the manual effort needed for identifying beneficial owners in AML/KYC activities," says Jonassen.
Ole works as Sales Director in Tietoevry Industry. He has over 25 years of experience working with Data Services through our Data Access, Data Governance, and Data Intelligence areas. His main focus is on strategic business- and credit solutions for the Banking industry. As a certified AML/KYC Specialist from Vega Integrity (PwC), Ole has a strong footprint developing our AML/KYC Data Services into the next generation of Nordic deliveries.
Contact Ole if you have any questions on the topic.