Muinmos was founded back in 2012 after Remonda Kirketerp-Møllersaw a big gap in the market for making client onboarding simpler and more efficient in financial services. With a rapidly growing global client base of banks, investment firms and asset managers, the company is emerging as a major player in key global markets.
Muinmos is the only RegTech firm on the global market which can provide complete automation and centralisation of the entire onboarding process. The company has developed a comprehensive solution that includes not just the normal KYC / AML checks, but also a one of a kind Regulatory Onboarding Engine that uses algorithmic rule-based AI, machine learning and neural nets to help financial institutions to fully and compliantly onboard any client type in under three minutes and instantly alerts financial institutions of any regulatory changes or sales opportunities.
According to Muinmos CTO Emil Kongelys, the automated system is designed to help compliance teams to easily keep track of the fast-changing regulations across countries and regions and is also able to provide connections to the best data providers globally in order to ensure any client in any country is onboarded correctly.
The company’s onboarding platform comprises of three unique product modules – mPASS™, mCHECK™ and mRX™. mPASS™ is the aforementioned AI-basedRegulatory Onboarding Engine which instantly and automatically performs client categorisation, suitability & appropriateness checks amongst other things. mCHECK™ performs all KYC/AML checks instantly and automatically via numerous data sources and keeps monitoring clients throughout their lifecycle. To give a complete onboarding solution, Muinmos also developed the mRX™ module which creates instant and automated client risk assessments based on all relevant factors including jurisdictional, client type and category, product and service offered, transactional and customer risk, andKYC/AML parameters.
Automation is Key
What sets Muinmos apart from competitors in the space? Founder and CEO Kirketerp-Møller said, “The automation. All the parts of client onboarding, from client categorisation, suitability & appropriateness, cross-border clearance, to identity verification, PEPs, sanctions, UBO identification etc. – they’re all covered by the platform, and fully automated. Other solutions don’t offer, I believe, a solution that is both complete and automated. It’s usually one or the other. Also, our mPASS™ module is one of a kind – there’s no other regulatory onboarding engine similar to it out there on the global market.”
Another key differentiator for Muinmos is its ability to offer its three products on a global scale, simplifying regulatory challenges for financial institutions. Kirketerp-Møller continued, “You will find many companies that are hooking up to a number of different providers – for example, they are having to work with two or three or even more companies to be able to fulfil their KYC/AML needs across different regions, so the fact that our products span all key jurisdictions is definitely a huge selling point for us compared to our competitors. We minimise the number of different systems that the compliance function needs to use.”
Tech apprehension and trends
Whilst the pandemic has forced the majority of the global workforce to adapt to new technologies to continue working, there is still considerable apprehension amongst some workers in using platforms they are unsure about. This is no different in the RegTech sector, with traditional regulatory compliance companies having to face up to the new challenges posed by in-person restrictions and unease.
To Kirketerp-Møller, not only is the transition to RegTech mostly unstoppable, but not adapting to it could be hugely detrimental to a financial institution. She said, “The majority of financial institutions know that they have no choice but to make that switch, and those that don’t simply will not survive. And if they do survive, they’re going to be wiped out by fines because it’s just not possible to remain compliant using a couple of checklists and a couple of humans, even in a small setup, let alone a large one.
“I also think investors have become more in tune with what is going on. For example, if I am a person committing fraud, I’m not going to tell you that I slipped through the net. But if I know that you onboarded me without paying attention to the regulation and mis-sold a product to me, I will make sure you know the second I am done with my trade. You could say we could thank or maybe not thank social media for that, because there is a lot happening with regard to social media in people sharing their tactics – if they get compensated or if they know something is wrong, they share it and it can go viral very quickly.”
Even though there is still considerable apprehension around RegTech solutions with some traditional companies, Kirketerp-Møller believes a key trend that has developed within the industry over the last year has been an increased focus on digitising datasets. She commented, “There’s a lot happening everywhere, not just in our part of the world but also in other places.When we first founded the company, we would be insanely lucky to be able to pull anything through APIs, now that has almost become the norm in most jurisdictions.”
While datasets are being digitised, Muinmos’ CEO believes the digitisation of regulations – another growing trend – may be a little further off, “That is going to be at least a good decade from now. We would love to see it happen earlier but there is a lot that needs to happen first. Before digitising regulations (meaning, making them machine-readable and even machine-executable), there is a more urgent need to cleanse the existing databases. Of course, that task is not ours, to cleanse datasets, but in order to make it useful for our clients we sometimes have to do that exercise.”
Potential roadblocks
As the company looks towards the future, Kirketerp-Møller stated that the company sees Europe as a key market but is also seeing more happening in both Asia and the US as well as Canada. While it is going from strength to strength, do any roadblocks lie in the way for Muinmos?
Muinmos CTO Kongelys detailed that a key roadblock lies in the countries that are not digitised enough, and this is why he says the company is trying to work with local data sources when it comes to the matter in order to expand the data as they see it.
Kirketerp-Møller added, “What we try to do is find really talented local people that are doing exactly that[sourcing data] for a living and they focus purely and simply on their local markets. In addition, in some jurisdictions you simply cannot get in them yourself to extract any data if you are not local or registered locally or you’re not running with local people. For example, in some offshores the barriers to getting data there are not rooted only in matters such as secrecy, but it’s simply that the local registers don’t hold on to these datasets and if they do they are not digital.”
“These markets are harder to break into because they haven’t really seen this technology yet – it is a new thing for them and they are worried. You instantly see the masking whether their regulator can approve you, and of course regulators don’t approve software, otherwise that would leave too much room for almost removing all sorts of competition from international coverage.
“However, I think that even though the process is slow, it is certainly progressing, and a lot more markets realize that this is the way forward. Markets are evolving and countries are getting better and better in data storage and availability, and that in turn allows regulators to start pushing for more RegTech solutions, and we’re seeing in many parts of the world that regulators are actually pushing for RegTech solutions. This can only be a good thing – for the financial institutions, for the investors and, of course, for Muinmos.”
Earlier this week, Muinmos was named in the fifth annual RegTech100 list, which identifies the most innovative companies that compliance teams must know about in 2022. To view the full list and get more information on Muinmos, visit RegTech100.com.
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