Compass from Penitude Consulting

Challenges for financial institutions

A robust and effective country risk assessment is crucial for financial crime risk management in financial institutions. Country risk significantly influences critical controls, such as customer risk assessment, business wide risk evaluation and transaction monitoring, often carrying substantial weight.

Maintaining a robust and reliable country risk index is a challenging and time-consuming task for most organisations. However:

Country risk factors

Country risk factors can be complex – a compliant and defendable approach demands careful consideration of numerous risk types and diverse data sources.

In-depth analysis

Conducting in-depth analysis by financial crime first or second line teams is often impractical at the required scale, encompassing up to 250 countries.

In-house models

While in-house models can reduce manual analysis, they often come with high design and maintenance costs. Furthermore, this approach can result in a lack of transparency to stakeholders and difficulty in providing assurance to senior management and regulators.

Off-the-shelf solutions

Off-the-shelf solutions often require significant work to set up and maintain. Moreover, these solutions are typically not tailored for financial crime services and may fall short in covering the critical risk faced by financial institutions.

Key features

Plenitude Compass is specifically designed for FCC teams, blending the best features of existing solutions with unique enhancements that set it apart from other vendor offerings:

Country risk calculation

Provides a transparent and procedural approach to country risk calculation – fully documented and aligned to financial crime regulations and guidance.
Addresses the complex financial crime risk landscape

Addresses the complex financial crime risk landscape and provides distinct coverage of six key financial crime risk types facing financial institutions: money laundering, sanctions violations, terrorist financing, bribery and corruption, tax offences, and proliferation financing.
Dedicated cloud platform

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. The Index is exportable into PDF and Excel for integration with financial crime controls. There are individual country dashboards presenting an in-depth analysis of the financial crime risks present and the calculation of the risk category; and an explanation of the specific underlying risk exposures to assist in risk assessments (both client and enterprise).
Maintenance-free solution

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.
Extensive customisation

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.

Data sources

To ensure a robust approach to country risk, Compass uses 30 high-quality, publicly available data sources in our standard methodology.

This approach assesses country risk across six critical financial crime risk types facing financial institutions.

Compass benefits and outcomes

Seamless regulatory alignment

Our procedural methodology seamlessly aligns with all relevant regulations and guidance, having proven its resilience under rigorous regulatory scrutiny.
Training and education

Our online tool serves as an invaluable resource for training and educating first- and second-line staff on country risk and its underlying drivers, empowering more effective decision-making.
Effective financial crime risk management

Our comprehensive country risk categorisation enhances the effectiveness of financial crime risk management within your institution.
Cost-effective

Compass significantly reduces the costs associated with developing and maintaining an in-house country risk methodology.
Synced regulatory lists

We ensure your country risk index remains current and in sync with regulatory lists, including those from the UK, EU and FATF high-risk country lists.