Case study

Setting the industry standard for KYC with Icon's SMEs

The challenge

Our client, a Global Tier 1 Bank, approached Icon with a very specific set of needs. They were under threat of significant financial and business penalties from external national and regional industry regulators and needed to improve in-house controls for anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance.


The client had a vision to set the Industry standard for knowing their customers, for the ability to detect, deter and protect against financial crimes such as money laundering, sanctions avoidance, and bribery and corruption. To facilitate this, they initiated a major transformations programme to implement consistency in standards, processes and systems across Global Operations.


Our client required immediate support with understanding and articulating the extremely complex combination of the external regulatory requirements and their internal requirements, both global and country-specific.


Challenges included:

  • Legacy Technology: Sub-optimal legacy technology decisions resulted in huge obstacles for the client who required immediate help in defining a more strategic target architecture and roadmap for migration.
  • Schedule Demands: Traditional development methodologies already in use at the bank necessitated a major overhaul for successful delivery.
  • Geographical Differences: The solution needed to be deployed to 58 countries worldwide, with different countries having varying degrees of sophistication in their local processes and IT solutions.
  • Customer Data Inconsistencies: The clients customer data is spread across various systems of record in different countries with inconsistent levels of quality. Icon's significant experience of integrating complex IT landscapes meant that we could deal pragmatically with data integration, enrichment and standardisation across many different systems, at the same time aligning with our client's parallel strategic architecture initiatives to remediate this problem long term.

Icon's solution 

Prior to Icon's engagement, there was a significant risk that the bank would not be able to meet their regulatory commitments or achieve their vision. The programme has now delivered six iterations of the KYC Solution, and rollout to countries is progressing well.


As a direct result of Icon's engagement, the bank has significantly improved:

  • Their overall data quality
  • Their understanding of their customer base
  • How to use their customer data for risk analysis and targeted communications
  • Their ability to react to future regulatory requirements

"Icon has made a tremendous contribution to the delivery of the bank's global KYC solution. They provided the heart of the architecture team and as such have been pivotal in both the conceptual, functional and technical architecture. A consistently high level of expertise and delivery has been demonstrated. Icon have behaved like a true partner in this programme."

Head of Retail Banking, Global Tier 1 Bank

Need help? 

Find out how Icon could help you improve your organisation's

architecture governance and processes

CONTACT US