Client Meeting and Travel Management

Offering or discussing financial services with clients is highly regulated in most countries. This applies particularly to client meetings abroad, for example, in the country where a client is domiciled. Today, most financial institutions maintain these regulatory restrictions as text-based handbooks or country manuals, regularly updated by legal and compliance.

When planning a client interaction, relationship managers must review regulatory rules and possibly consult with legal & compliance to ensure the exchange with the client happens in a compliant manner. In most jurisdictions, restrictions for marketing banking services apply independently if client interactions are conducted via online video conference, e-mail or in-person by travelling to a client meeting.

When planning a client meeting in the financial institutions CRM tool or approving the business trip in the Travel Management solution, relationship managers need to be familiar with the regulatory restrictions for the specific situation. Consequently, they need to go through extensive cross-border training and understand lengthy country-specific PDF manuals. These manual compliance procedures are very inefficient and reach their limits, especially in more complex client interaction constellations.

While many financial institutions use workflows and tools for client meetings and travel approval, complying with the respective regulatory restrictions is commonly still a manual procedure, which causes lots of preparation work for the relationship managers and the supervisors reviewing travel requests. Failing to identify a compliance restriction can lead to compliance breaches and severe sanctions for individuals and the financial institution as such.

The Apiax Cross-border APIs allow financial institutions to integrate regulatory rules directly into their tools, providing quick answers to meeting and travel situations with clients, and minimising maintenance in case of regulatory change. Only compliant meetings and trips are processed and approved by evaluating detailed information such as client type, location of both the client and the financial institution, and the country in which the meeting takes place.

This guide explains how to integrate cross-border services (behavioural) rules and empower your users to check for dos and don'ts in a specific cross-border context.

Find below how to access the relevant cross-border rules, inspect the API to retrieve country-specific values, retrieve binary results on activities and additional information such as remarks and restrictions, and apply the best practice on where and how to bring the rules into your CRM's user interface.

Integrate with your tools:

• Customer Relationship Management Solution
  
  
• Contract Lifecycle Management
  
  
• Travel Management Solution
  
  
• Travel Booking System

Pre-requirements

Before starting, ensure that you have:

• A SaaS subscription to the Apiax API (optional subscription to the Apiax platform)
• An active subscription for the relevant digital compliance rules (content)
• A user account with access rights
• A ready to use API authentication and access
• A capable customer-facing solution to integrate

For more information, see Apiax initial account setup.

Use cases and studies

Apiax offers a series of business cases and studies to gain further insights into the business benefits of switching to embedded compliance rather than following traditional compliance approaches.
Refer to the use cases webpage on apiax.com or contact Apiax for more information and an overview of how you can move your business forward with ready-to-use solutions for embedded compliance.

Introduction

This integration guide provides step-by-step instructions of a business case, taking you through the process of embedding compliance into your environment, team or process. Make sure to follow these steps with your specific case and situation in mind. Adopt and extend rules, attributes and API requests where necessary.

Apiax offers test and live API keys and rule governance and versioning functions for you to test and validate changes before applying them.

Example to get started

Anita works as a Relationship Manager for Financial Institution Ltd. in Switzerland. She travelled to Singapore, and a prospective client located in Spain approached her to discuss the bank’s offer of a discretionary mandate as soon as possible.

This example illustrates a complex three-country situation but is only one case in Anita's daily interaction with clients. Typical other scenarios are relationship managers planning to visit a client and socialise, discuss the past performance of the client's portfolio, offer new services such as financing or wealth planning activities. The Apiax digital compliance rules can cover all those scenarios and activities.

Objective: Anita can use the in-house travel tool, enter the exact client interaction scenario, and understand the permitted and prohibited actions in this specific cross-border case based on the Apiax cross-border rules. She can understand the detailed requirements and potential constraints before asking her manager for approval and quickly get back to the client.

This integration is based on travel management applying Discretionary Asset Management services. Client meeting preparation follows a similar logic using the same and related Apiax Financial Services rules. To relate to a situation of a client meeting providing Investment Advice, this guide includes some hints and tips during the example.