What is F.A.C.E.?
In Hong Kong, both the fund managers and their respective fund houses are governed by the Anti-Money Laundering Ordinance (AMLO) that mandates them to conduct Know Your Customer (“KYC”), monitor investor’s source of funds, and keep proper record. Fund managers make all investment decisions but also required to monitor the flow of the investment fund. Therefore, it is particularly difficult for smaller PE/VF fund managers who engage with high net-worth individual investors to monitor all aspects of business. Many fund managers will then engage services from external Fund Administrator firms that can help them to fulfil all necessary requirements.
Due to limitation of resources and operational processes, small and medium fund houses and their fund administrators have implemented operations, including the KYC process, in a rather manual and traditional way. They are lagging behind the pace of technology development in this FinTech era. Simultaneously, regulators have been advocating to transform financial businesses using technology that is supposed to foster them in many possible ways.
We are embarking on this initiative to provide Fund Managers with a platform that can manage and support the processes including managing investor records, risk, profiling each investor, screening investors against essential watchlists and monitoring the in and out of investors’ fund. The platform is known as the Fund Administration Compliance Essential (FACE).
KEY FEATURES.
FACE is a one-stop platform to support fund managers’ or fund administrators’ key operational functions as an optimal way to control costs and manage their internal resources more effectively. Core functions for FACE include investor KYC, investor fund in and out monitoring, fund accounting, transfer agency, regulatory compliance, legal support, and middle office operational tasks.
It will keep building functions to allow investors to share their own KYC documentations to any fund house using the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), hence creating efficiency and at the same time maintaining high data security and integrity.
