How Proofdesk fits together
It’s helpful to have a basic understanding of how Proofdesk works under the hood. This section gives you a quick overview of how everything fits together before we get into the practical, hands-on steps in the next part.
You can think of Proofdesk as a set of connected folders and forms, each with a specific purpose. In many cases these forms have been adapted to reflect your organisation’s own approach to compliance but the types of folders and forms that exist are baked into the system and are fundamental to how Proofdesk works.
Before we look at each type of folder and form one by one, it’s worth understanding how forms work.
Forms
Almost everything you interact with within Proofdesk is presented to you as a form. Forms start with a status of Draft, meaning they haven’t been finalised yet. You can use the Save Draft button at any time to save your progress. When you’re ready, clicking Complete will finalise the form. Proofdesk will automatically stamp your name and the date at the bottom.
Think of this as the digital equivalent of signing your initials on a paper form, showing that you’ve completed it.
Once a form is marked as Complete, it becomes read-only. If you need to make changes later, just click New Version. Proofdesk will copy everything into a fresh draft version for you to update. The original version stays safely stored as a permanent record like leaving the original paper form in the folder for posterity and working on a photocopy.
You’ll repeat this process whenever something changes, for example, when a customer updates their address. Each version builds on the last, giving your organisation a complete, auditable history of how information has evolved.
This versioning system is one of the cornerstones of Proofdesk. It’s what allows you to demonstrate that you’re not only compliant today, but that you were compliant six months ago, a year ago, 3 years ago, and so on.
Entities
The first of our folders (they're not really folders but it helps to think of them that way) is Entities.
An entity is simply a profile in the system representing any individual, company, trust, partnership or foundation that your organisation needs to store information about. Every entity only ever exists in Proofdesk once, regardless of how many ways they're known to your firm. So if "Blue Sky Limited" is both your customer and a shareholder of another customer, they still only appear in your list of entities once.
Think of entities as being like contacts in your address book that we can refer to at a later stage.
Each entity "folder" contains four types of form:
Identity - Contains the facts you know about them (Name, Address, Incorporate Date)
Documents - Attachments used to back up the facts in the Identity
Screening - The results of your PEP, Sanctions, Adverse Media and CEP screening
Structure - Links to other entities stored in Proofdesk such as Directors, Shareholders, Beneficiaries
Combined, these forms represent the CDD you have collected about a given entity. When we reference the entity later all of that evidence is automatically pulled through.
Relationships
A relationship is the link between your organisation and your customer. For the purposes of AML/CFT it's important to separate the idea of your customer (an Entity) and the Relationship you have with that customer. You're not actually risk assessing the customer alone, but the combination of the customer and the way you do business with them including the nature, scope, and delivery of the services you provide.
Different industries have different names for this: Law firms might call it a matter, accountancy firms an engagement, life assurance firms a policy. Proofdesk uses the term relationship to match the regulator's use of "business relationship / occasional transaction".
Within Proofdesk, each relationship is represented by a unique reference number, is linked to a single customer entity, and is made up of a timeline of reviews.
Reviews
A Review is a bundle of forms that represents everything known about a Relationship at a given point in time.
Every Relationship begins with an Onboarding Review, followed by a series of Periodic and Trigger Event Reviews as time progresses. Regardless of the reason for the Review, each one contains the same set of forms:
Relationship Details - The facts about this specific relationship
Customer Risk Assessment - Your assessment of the risks posed by this relationship
Approval - Evidence of who signed off the relationship and when.
Each time you complete a Review, Proofdesk locks it as a permanent record like sealing that bundle of paperwork and filing it away in the folder.
Crucially, Proofdesk also takes a snapshot of the customer Entity and all its linked Entities (and their documents) as they existed at that moment in time.
When it’s time for the next Review, Proofdesk makes a full copy of the previous one for you to update. That way, you always start from the most recent information without ever overwriting what came before.
Policies
Finally, just a quick note on how your organisation's account is configured. Every firm that uses Proofdesk has a slightly different approach to AML/CFT. For this reason, the platform is highly configurable. There are three policies built into Proofdesk that allow firms to vary the way the it works:
Risk Classification Policy - Sets out which risk levels you use, how often you review your customers, and who needs to sign them off.
Identity Policy - Defines your firm's minimum expectations for what CDD you collect and verify.
Customer Risk Assessment Policy - Establishes the template of multiple choice questions that feeds your CRAs.
Each of the Forms we've discussed are also configurable. While they each contain a handful of fields that cannot be edited or removed, most of the fields you see are specific to your organisation.
As you might expect there's a great deal more that underpins Proofdesk, but those are the key concepts you need to understand to get started.