Fenergo, IBM Enter Agreement

Tom Burroughes

21 April 2020

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The agreement enables the firms to create solutions meshing Fenergo's customer lifecycle management offering with IBM's regulatory technology portfolio of anti-money laundering and know-your-client solutions.

IBM plans to use this work so that clients can embed artificial intelligence-driven insights into Fernergo’s CLM offering. Fenergo's software is designed to cut “false positives” when it comes to making AML and KYC checks. (In the financial world, a false positive is akin to a false alarm that a person might, for example, be a Politically Exposed Person or criminal, when he or she is not, but has a commonly-used name.)

The stakes for wealth managers in avoiding doing business with crooks and those with questionable sources of wealth are huge, as a raft of anti-money laundering cases, often leading to heavy fines and reputational loss, show. Fenergo said that more than $10 billion in fines were imposed on companies and financial institutions in 2019 for breaking AML, KYC and sanctions regulations. Since 2008, the total value of fines amounts to $36 billion.