By John Eley – CEO at GoldenSource
FATCA compliance is just around the corner
With the official start of FATCA just around the corner, the recent announcement by the IRS that years 2014 and 2015 will now be regarded as a “transition period” for FATCA compliance will have no doubt led to many financial institutions heaving a deep sigh of relief.
While the objective of this transition period is “to facilitate an orderly transition” for FATCA-impacted organizations that are struggling to comply, it is important to note that this does not translate into another extension of the FATCA deadline. Financial institutions must continue with their FATCA preparations and demonstrate good progress is being made.
As discussed in our prior comments about FATCA, compliance will involve all critical data sets, and not just customer data. This is particularly important for large financial institutions, whose multiple lines of business invariably create additional complexity when it comes to aggregating and understanding data.
GoldenSource is helping our customers achieve FATCA readiness in several different ways:
Coverage. It’s much easier to start with a predefined package than to build something from scratch. GoldenSource EDM not only provides out-of-the-box coverage for critical FATCA data elements associated with customers, business entities, and instruments, but also the pre-configured and actively maintained Connections to enable financial institutions to obtain this information from data vendors and other third parties.
Linkage. GoldenSource EDM excels at data relationships. It takes the guesswork out of linking different data sets together – whether these data sets result from multiple lines of business, multiple regions, or simply the need to link customer or counterparty data with issuer data or link two different masters together. Knowledge is power – and GoldenSource brings all of your latent knowledge about a customer, counterparty, or issuer together into a consolidated view.
Workflow. Part of FATCA compliance is gathering the right information. The other part is taking action accordingly – through IRS report filings or withholding, depending upon the FATCA status of the customer/counterparty involved. GoldenSource EDM delivers the right data to the right people and systems so that filing or withholding workflows can be executed by your service providers or tax systems. Additionally, GoldenSource EDM workflow triggers the periodic reassessments which must be done as part of ongoing FATCA diligence.
Experience. GoldenSource is already being used by leading financial institutions to comply with FATCA. Rather than re-engineering everything, these customers found they could achieve FATCA success practically by drawing upon our knowledge, experience, and core product capabilities. Let us put our ideas to work for you – if interested, Contact us to learn more