Novo Holdings

Global Investment Leader with a Growing Compliance Need

Novo Holdings is one of the world’s largest privately held holding and investment companies managing roughly €142 billion in assets for the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Headquartered in Hellerup (near Copenhagen, Denmark), Novo Holdings focuses on life sciences, with a long-term goal of improving health and sustainability.

Mia Bøttzauw-Jørgensen is Head of Investments Operations at Novo Holdings, and she joined the organization’s Finance team back in 2019. At this time, KYC was managed by the organization’s Legal team, however these tasks gradually shifted to Mia as she held the relationships with the company’s banking partners. Over time, Novo Holdings’ increasing investment activities caused their KYC tasks to escalate significantly. Mia led her team through rapid expansion, and Andeta Jonuzaj Mosgaard came on board in 2021, to support the Finance Operations and Investments teams equally. Today, Andeta is fully dedicated to supporting Finance Operations and, beyond taking care of KYC, she has a full workload managing payments, reporting and many other related tasks. 

Optimizing time-consuming workflows amid a rising KYC volume

With more and more incoming KYC requests in 2022 and 2023, the Finance Operations team was starting to feel overwhelmed. No two KYC requests were ever the same, each typically taking between 30 and 40 minutes to respond to – and there were up to 600 requests per year. The team’s KYC work was becoming impossible to manage, and it was draining their valuable time.

In short:

• Legacy processes that were potentially risk-prone

• Manual, fragmented workflows

• Lack of oversight and control

Mia and Andeta recognized that these broken workflows were wasting time, causing unnecessary confusion, and putting the organization under an increased risk of data breaches.

Bringing Avallone on board to gain time and streamline compliance

Coincidentally around this time, Andeta was introduced to Avallone by the team at NREP (now known as Urban Partners), who were already using the Avallone platform. Recognizing their own KYC challenges, she decided to look into whether the use of a KYC tool could improve Novo Holdings’ own KYC workflows. The team assessed Avallone against another software solution, with the following criteria in mind:

• They needed an intuitive, comprehensive and secure KYC tool for responding to banks' questionnaires, streamline compliance activities, and provide a better oversight on KYC for all stakeholders.

• They wanted to save time in their KYC workflows, as requests from banks were rapidly increasing.

• They were looking to work with a responsive partner to help facilitate onboarding and ongoing operations, and to ease their KYC burden.

• Novo Holdings’ Legal Team added an additional condition: As well as a tool to respond to KYC requests, the selected software also needed a built-in, secure and easy-to-use way of collecting KYC from investment counterparties.
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The Avallone platform met all of these criteria, and it stood out to Andeta and Mia for its modern, intuitive design:

“I was really impressed by what Avallone could do. Avallone was quicker and smarter than the other tool we assessed. It felt really easy to use, modern, and fast. As we wanted to gain time through better management of our KYC processes, it felt well-suited to our needs” - Andeta

The team came on board with Avallone’s KYC Responder product three years ago, with a goal to start using its KYC Collector in the near future.

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300+ hours / year saved with faster, smarter and more secure KYC workflows

By implementing Avallone, Novo Holdings reclaimed over 300 hours annually - equivalent to three working days per month. The According to Mia and Andeta, the impact of Avallone was immediate and significant. The platform’s intuitive interface and streamlined processes meant that previously cumbersome tasks could now be completed in a fraction of the time. Novo Holdings now saves over 300 hours per year on KYC activities:

“It’s a very fast system, and so intuitive. We used to spend 40 minutes on a typical KYC request, whereas now it can take as little as ten minutes. This means that we’ve gained around three working days per month, which equates to more than 300 hours per year!”  - Mia

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Improved visibility and collaboration

With Avallone, every team member could now take ownership of KYC cases and track the status of their banks’ requests.

“We went from a totally analog setup where we had no oversight of our KYC work, to a full overview and audit trail available at any time.” - Mia

The KYC Responder provided clear visibility into sent KYC packages, notifying the team when the bank had received and downloaded them. The ability to send secure links instead of bulky email attachments also meant that documents reached their recipients faster, and without the risk of being lost or blocked due to file size.

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The transparency around communication with Novo Holdings’ banks made it easier to ensure that nothing fell through the cracks. The platform’s audit trail also meant that the team could challenge their partners if they claimed not to have received documents, as they now had proof of delivery.
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Enhanced security and peace of mind

Avallone’s secure portal eliminated the need to send passport copies and other sensitive documents via email. This not only improved data security but also gave both Novo Holdings and its stakeholders peace of mind, knowing that personal information was being handled professionally and in line with best practices. Banks and other partners recognized and congratulated the team on their use of Avallone, further validating the platform’s effectiveness:

“We were positively surprised by the reaction of our banks, and we’ve actually had Danske Bank congratulate us on our use of Avallone. In fact, 90% of our banking partners have been happy to use Avallone, even the ones that initially wanted to use their own system.” Andeta

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Bonus: discovery of extra KYC Responder features

Andeta and Mia enjoyed discovering KYC Responder features they were not previously aware of, such as its legal entity structure module which uses ownership information already in the platform to auto-generate clear and professional diagrams.

Andeta and Mia also appreciated that they no longer wasted time searching for documents, as the most up-to-date version of everything they needed was always available in the platform:

“You just click a button and your documents are there. We also feel reassured that we have the latest, updated version of every document in Avallone.” - Mia

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Phase two: KYC Collector and Avallone experts deliver end-to-end investment support

Towards the end of 2024, in line with Novo Holdings’ strategic investment objectives, the team turned their attention to screening and risk scoring their investment counterparties. In order to deliver these goals, they started to use Avallone’s KYC Collector tool.

At the same time, the team decided to bring on board Avallone’s Advisory Services to assist with the setup of this new work, which involved Avallone’s KYC and financial crime prevention experts supporting Novo Holdings with developing risk assessments, drafting policies and procedures, and attending meetings with the organization’s investment teams to answer any questions:

“Sune Warberg Clausen, who heads up Avallone’s Financial Crime Prevention Team, was a perfect partner throughout this process. He knows everything about KYC, a true professional, and was super helpful in answering everyone’s questions.” - Mia

Once the groundwork was completed, Novo Holdings decided to manage the extra ongoing workload of screening and risk scoring counterparties using the support of Avallone’s Managed Services. The team worked with Avallone on a process in which Novo Holdings’ Junior Analyst uses the KYC Collector to request information from counterparties and then forwards the details to Avallone’s Financial Crime Prevention (FCP) team. The FCP team reports back to Novo Holdings with their findings and recommendations, and insights shared back and forth are used to improve Novo Holdings’ investment decisions.

The team at Novo Holdings finds that this way of working ensures that they have a reliable and scalable solution for managing this workload, as it can be highly unpredictable in terms of volume. The team also reported that it’s helpful to have an expert third party involved in these sensitive screening and risk scoring tasks, who also acts as an external advisor.

“If we were to hire a team in-house to undertake this work, we’d have their payroll to manage, as well as the added responsibilities and risks of employing people. Working with Avallone is a completely known entity. if there are more collection requests then we can easily scale up the activities, and if there are fewer needs then we haven’t lost anything. Now that we’ve started to work in this way, we’re confident that Avallone is the perfect match for us” - Mia

The FCP team’s findings have played an important role in Novo Holdings’ subsequent investment decisions.

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The Future: Building a foundation for smarter, AI-enhanced KYC future

Novo Holdings’ work with Avallone has not only transformed their KYC processes, saving hundreds of hours each year and boosting their visibility, data security and partner relationships, but it now provides them with a stable foundation for further optimization. The availability of KYC data points and reporting features enables the team to better analyze their KYC work today and fine-tune their goals and processes going forwards.

In addition, it’s important for Novo Holdings to work with a partner (such as Avallone) that is committed to exploring the ever-evolving opportunities afforded by AI and other new technologies:

“Digital transformation is something we’re investing heavily in at Novo Holdings, and we’re excited to see what’s coming down the line in the KYC space. Although we’ve made significant progress in this area through working with Avallone, our KYC tasks are constantly increasing, and we’re excited to hear how Avallone’s new developments can further support this work.” - Mia