OVERVIEW
Challenges For Financial Institutions
Effective and robust assessment of geographical risk is a cornerstone of financial crime risk management for financial institutions. Country risk impacts many key financial crime controls, including customer risk assessment, business-wide risk assessment and transaction monitoring, and usually carries a significant weighting.

Maintaining an effective and reliable country risk index is a time-consuming and challenging task for most organisations, however:
- Country risks factors can be complex; a compliant and defendable approach requires consideration of many risk types and data sources.
- In-depth analysis by Financial Crime 1st or 2nd Line teams is often not feasible to perform and maintain at the scale required, i.e. up to 250 countries.
- Models developed in-house can reduce manual analysis, however, these often carry a significant cost to design and maintain. Furthermore, this approach can result in a lack of transparency to stakeholders and in difficulty in providing assurance to senior management and regulators.
- Existing off-the-shelf solutions often require significant work to set-up and maintain. Furthermore, these are often not dedicated financial crime services, and may lack complete coverage of key risk types facing FIs.
FEATURES & BENEFITS
Financial Crime Country Risk
Plenitude Compass has been developed specifically for Financial Crime Compliance teams. It combines the most effective aspects of existing solutions with several key enhancements that clearly differentiate it from other vendor solutions:
Provides a transparent and procedural approach to country risk calculation, that is fully documented and that aligns with financial crime regulations and guidance.
Addresses the complex financial crime risk landscape and provides distinct coverage of six key financial crime risk types facing FIs: money laundering, sanctions violations, terrorist financing, bribery & corruption, tax offences, and proliferation financing.
Hosted on our dedicated cloud platform that provides interactive web access to individual country risk dashboards for all 249 ISO-3166 countries, each providing an in-depth analysis of the financial crime risks present.
Ensures a maintenance-free solution for our clients, with updates to data sources and risk categorisations performed at least every three months, and changes analysed and documented in detail.
Delivers extensive customisation options as needed, including the ability to add and remove data sources, re-configure numerical thresholds, apply overrides to risk categories, and export custom data feeds for use in internal tools and systems.
HOW IT WORKS
Compass Online
Compass is hosted on our dedicated cloud platform that makes it easy to access and understand country risk data.


- Interactive access to country risk data covering all 249 ISO-3166 countries (plus three other territories/regions). No installation or IT involvement required.
- Index exportable into PDF and Excel for integration with financial crime controls, such as client risk assessment and transaction monitoring (other custom feeds in XML and JSON available).
- Interactive access to country risk data covering all 249 ISO-3166 countries (plus three other territories/regions). No installation or IT involvement required.
- Index exportable into PDF and Excel for integration with financial crime controls, such as client risk assessment and transaction monitoring (other custom feeds in XML and JSON available).

Compass Benefits & Outcomes
Our procedural methodology is fully aligned with applicable regulations and guidance and has withstood regulatory scrutiny.
Comprehensive country risk categorisation which will drive more effective financial crime risk management within your institution.
Provides assurance that your country risk index is kept up-to-date and is aligned with regulatory lists, including the UK, EU and FATF high risk country lists.
Our online tool is a valuable resource to train and educate first and second line staff on country risk and the underlying risk drivers, facilitating more effective decision making.
Reduces the costs associated with the development and maintenance of an in-house country risk methodology.
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