Top 6 compliance KPIs that separate top performers from the rest

Compliance challenges are primarily operational in nature.

Like other company operations—such as customer support, HR, and more—it is essential to track performance indicators to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.

Here are some examples of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that compliance teams can monitor to evaluate their performance and activity:

Time-to-decision

The time-to-decision measures the time for the compliance team to make a decision on a case. It’s a key metric that gives insights on both your operational efficiency and the quality of your user experience. Therefore, it can be used as the main KPI.

This metric can be followed with a distribution graph as such:

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Percentage of cases with instant decision

As a drill-down metric to the time-to-decision, the percentage of cases with instant decision can measure how much your KYB process is automated.

Indeed, only advanced automations can provide good results on this metric. Especially one need to implement automatic decisions which can pose a compliance challenge.

Not bragging here, but Ondorse can do such automatic decisions: automations can be setup so that a low risk case is approved as soon as all verifications have been done performed.

Number of back-and-forths with customer

This one is a very operational but very actionable.

A back-and-forth happens, for instance, when your compliance team receives a case but a document or a key information is missing: the front-office team has to get back to the customer and wait for the answer to make the case more forward. These back-and-forths are a real pain for everyone: for your customer and your team.

Tracking this metric by measuring the average number of back-and-forths and understand the causes is the key to operational efficiency.

Compliance pipe throughput

To ensure your compliance pipe is running smoothly, you might want to keep an eye on its input and output:

• number of new cases per month (or per week): how many new cases your team have to verify per month (or per week)
• number of closed cases per month (or per week): how many cases your team approves (or rejects) per month (or per week)
• number of cases currently in verification: this is basically the length of your team’s todo list. It represents your team’s workload. If this keeps increasing, your team might be overloaded.

Note that you can have different types of pipes. The most common example is an onboarding pipes, where cases are verified before establishing a business relationship. However, it could also include a KYB refresh pipe, a transaction monitoring alert pipe, and others.

Cost and FTE /case

What is the cost to verify a customer? That’s a key question when your company will look at their financial metrics. You need to be able to provide such metrics.

To calculate this, you must take into account the FTE per case, which measures the human time and effort required for each verification, and the cost of data per case, including any fees associated with accessing customer information (e.g., purchasing documents) or conducting necessary checks (e.g., screening).

Slice-and-dice

To gain deeper insights and drive actionable improvements, these metrics can be further analyzed by slicing and dicing the data across different dimensions such as risk level, country, or agent.

For instance:

• breaking down time-to-decision by risk level can reveal whether high-risk cases are causing bottlenecks in your process.
• analyzing the percentage of cases with instant decisions by country may highlight disparities in automation success due to region-specific compliance requirements.
• number of back-and-forths or compliance pipe throughput by individual agents can help identify training needs or workload imbalances within your team.

Tracking and analyzing these KPIs is essential for compliance teams to measure and improve their operational efficiency. By focusing on metrics such as time-to-decision, automation rates, back-and-forths, throughput, and cost per case, compliance teams can identify inefficiencies, streamline processes, and enhance the overall user experience.

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