Nearly all compliance leaders confident but audit trail gaps remain

One in four firms cannot back their data up.

Nearly all Hong Kong compliance leaders (96%) are confident their screening data is complete and up to date, above the 94% global average, according to a survey by LSEG Risk Intelligence.

However, the city ranked last amongst Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets in its ability to produce an audit trail for an individual screening decision, at 76%, compared with Singapore (96%), Australia (86%) and Japan (80%).

About one in four Hong Kong respondents said evidence is incomplete, would take significant effort to compile, or that they would struggle to produce an audit trail at all—the highest share in APAC, against just 4% in Singapore.

The survey pointed to internal data quality as a particular weak point for Hong Kong, as 16% said their external reference data is strong but their internal data is not, the highest share amongst the ten markets surveyed.

Businesses in the city said faster onboarding and monitoring decisions would be the most impactful outcome of improved data quality, explainability and matching, cited by 40%, second only to Singapore (46%) and well above the 29% global figure.

Another 36% said they want to spend less time on manual checks and remediation.

On artificial intelligence (AI), keeping human review in the decision-making process was the leading condition for trust in AI-supported screening amongst 44% of respondents, level with Singapore and above the 35% global figure.

A further 36% pointed to strong controls to reduce bias or unfair outcomes as a condition for trust, the highest share amongst all ten markets surveyed, against 24% globally.

Meanwhile, 28% cited AI being built on trusted, high-quality data, the lowest in APAC and below the global figure of 40%, despite data quality being the city's weak link.