Challenge
Operating across DIFC, ADGM and Bahrain meant maintaining three slightly-different onboarding flows, three KYC questionnaire packs and three review cadences — all glued together with email and a shared drive. New-client onboarding took 18 working days on average; periodic review backlogs were creeping past 90 days at peak.
How we delivered
We modelled the three regulatory profiles (DFSA, FSRA, CBB) as configuration on top of a single SpeciVIM workflow — the underlying questionnaire engine reuses 80% of the questions across jurisdictions, with a thin overlay for jurisdiction-specific deltas (UAE PEP screening rules, AED reporting thresholds, etc.).
Sanctions, PEP and adverse-media screening were consolidated onto a single provider integration with continuous re-screening, replacing three separate vendor contracts.
Periodic review was switched from a calendar trigger to a risk-driven trigger: clients tagged High move to a 6-month cycle, Standard to 18 months, Low to 36 — with automatic escalation when a sanctions hit or material change appears.
Outcome
Median onboarding cycle time dropped from 18 to 6 working days. Periodic review throughput tripled at constant team size, clearing the backlog within four months. The compliance team reports a single, unified caseload to the executive committee instead of three separate ones.
“We are governed by three regulators. We do not need three operating models. SpeciVIM let us keep the rigour and drop the duplication.”
