We are often asked how we came up with the name of our Client Onboarding and Lifecycle Management system, ‘Embus’. Comments such as ‘it’s an unusual name, is it made up?’ and ‘what does Embus stand for?’ often crop up in conversation.
The definition of Embus is ‘to board or put on to a bus’. It’s actually used primarily in the military and its origins date back to the First World War when the British Army issued an order for the mass requisition of London buses so they could be used to ‘embus’ their troops down to the coast. It is still used in the military today to describe the movement of soldiers, ‘soldiers had on arrival embused for a journey to a known destination’. It’s therefore entirely apt that we apply it to our platform.
The Client Onboarding and Lifecycle Management journey also involves a known destination, which includes not just the client, but all internal stakeholders in the onboarding and lifecycle management process.
Banks and Financial institutions continue to struggle on this journey, which is a precarious one, as a result of ever changing market dynamics, fierce competition, regulatory scrutiny and operational overheads.
At MYRIAD Embus Limited, our starting-point for this journey has evolved by appreciating that the onboarding process begins as early as the moment a cold-call is made, a business card is swapped or an initial meeting ends. The essential ingredients of a future Client relationship are mixed at that moment. The Client Pre-Onboarding process begins with the basic static information associated with the Prospect as well as the meeting note, initial impressions and next steps. This is all further complicated now and beyond May 2018 with the arrival of GDPR, so having a solution which caters for this new regulatory obligation along the Provider-Client continuum makes huge sense.
Having established the causal effect between initial Prospect contact to ‘ready to trade’, laying out the ‘logic’ should be a key determinant of all future activity. Conducting the pre-Onboarding process from initial data capture, meeting notes and next steps, the exchange of proprietary material, signing of NDAs if required, exchange of due diligence and draft documentation, through KYC and AML checks and into the authorisation process, is mapped, tracked and additional activities triggered by a system which looks to tackle every aspect of its users’ needs right from first contact through to Client Lifecycle Management.
It goes without saying that all the data that has accrued through pre-Onboarding, through the formal Client Onboarding process and into Client Lifecycle Management needs to persist through time. Having a platform that can knit together isolated activities and functions, acting as an umbrella under which all this activity can be better managed, is a key component in the Embus offering.
In an environment that is more and more dominated by Governance, Risk and Compliance considerations, employing a system like Embus which can oversee all three and can coordinate often disjointed processes, is a significant strategic advantage and one which will not be lost on Compliance Departments, Senior Management and Regulators alike.
Peter Hall
CEO
MYRIAD Embus Limited
peter.hall@myriadembus.com
+44 (0) 203 470 0327
