How to Stop Repeating Due Diligence With Every Counterparty

Every aggregator a fintech connects to runs its own duplicate due diligence, draining time and resource that could go into building the business instead. Banks don't generally run that diligence directly -- it's the aggregator's job, and in regulated markets banks often have no real choice about the connection in the first place. What a bank might do instead, usually only in response to a perceived problem, is audit the aggregator itself -- and the aggregator may then pass some of that pain down to the fintechs behind it. A single accreditation satisfies every aggregator's due diligence at once, and gives the aggregator something solid to point to if a bank ever comes asking. That matters even more now that third-party oversight increasingly applies to fintechs directly, not just to the institutions they serve.

To cut duplication and meet direct oversight requirements at the same time, Chief Operating Officers (COOs) should structure their approach around three connected steps:

1. Prove trustworthiness once, not per counterparty: Use a single accreditation and live risk score to satisfy every aggregator at once, rather than repeating the same underlying evidence through each one's separate process.
2. Treat your own governance as a direct requirement: Recognize that third-party oversight rules increasingly apply to you directly, not only to the institutions you serve, and demonstrate that governance once rather than proving it separately to each counterparty.
3. Extend the same evidence trail down your own chain: Apply the same accreditation and evidence base to your own processors and sub-processors, whichever market's third-party oversight rules you answer to.

About Invela

Invela is the infrastructure layer that makes open finance trustworthy -- accrediting who's in the network, monitoring risk in real time, and ensuring liability lands in the right place. Open finance, covered.