Friday 14 December 2007

Falling standards in UK healthcare

It is not very encouraging to see that some of the prominent hospitals in UK have shown below par hygiene standards in recent years. NHS body Health Facilities Scotland produced a report last year which showed three of the Scotland’s leading hospitals not meeting the hygiene standards. NHS Watchdog and the Healthcare Commission have produced reports in the past two years highlighting various levels of falling standards.

Where are these falling standards taking us? According to the Patients Association, the general views shared by patients about NHS service are long waiting periods, delayed appointments, fear of filing complaints and confronting the doctor, office hours only, etc. Instead patients ought to be treated as customers and stakeholders.

For once globally renowned and exemplary British NHS service, up to-date and technologically advanced tools are required to give fair judgement to the assessment criteria. In that respect, it was a relief that NHS decided to part with the star rating system for the hospitals which was more synonymous with giving stars to children in schools. For the first time, last year NHS trusts assessed themselves against 44 quality standards of basic competence. According to the health inspection body, only third of the country’s 570 trusts met the standards, which include safety, governance and patient focus.

Thankfully, developments in technology have given us the ability to develop systems that can help the trusts implement these standards across the board and certify themselves. Read more about jComply and how it can help with your compliance process at jcomply.com.

Monday 3 December 2007

What is KYC and what does it stand for?

To enhance my knowledge on the subject I engaged in a few discussions with some professionals on KYC. I realized that very few people have detailed knowledge on the subject. Given the increased need for the implementation of KYC, I decided to share some basic information on the subject.

The term KYC – Know Your Customer means that financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies are obligated to record information on their customers and to check the plausibility of the information entered. The basis for KYC is endorsed by Article 8 of the 3rd EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive, 12.5 of the Banking (General Practice) Regulatory Code under the Banking Act 1998 and 6.1 of the Financial Supervision (Conduct of Business) Regulatory Code under The Investment Business Act 1991 for UK.
KYC consists of two parts; Customer Identification Program (CIP) and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD). CIP consists of collecting basic evidence on customer identification information such as utility bills, driver’s license, passports etc.

EDD goes further to adopt a risk based approach and demands financial institutions to identify the risk a customer represents, validate those risk categories and demonstrate effective customer due diligence to the regulator. The source of funds that are utilized as part of the business relationship and/or transaction as well as their intended use also must be determined. In the event that the source of the funds is not clear the financial institution must observe due diligence in carrying out a risk base assessment on the customer profile.

In an ideal situation this information is stored electronically in the “Know Your Customer” profile (KYC profile). Due to rapid globalization financial institutes all over the world should stress on KYC, keeping track of customer movements, risk assessment and profiling across borders. Breach of KYC and AML rules and regulations can result in serious penalties by the regulators.

Anjum
03/12/07