Vet a client for FICA in minutes, not an afternoon.
One secure link takes your client through intake, identity verification and screening, and leaves you a decision-ready file with the audit trail already written. Built for South African law firms, from the four-attorney practice up.
Two ways to run it: Verify and Comply.
A four-attorney firm carries the same duties as a hundred-attorney firm.
South African law firms are accountable institutions under FICA. The duties are real, personal to the firm, and enforced.
Today most firms discharge them by hand: chasing certified copies, retyping ID numbers, checking sanctions lists one name at a time. Hours per client, and the smaller the firm, the fewer people there are to absorb it. There is rarely a compliance department.
Onvett was built around the Act itself, around POPIA, and around the FIC’s guidance, so that doing the work produces the evidence as a by-product. Your firm still complies. Onvett carries the workload and shows the trail.
One link in, one decision-ready file out.
Invite the client, let intake and screening run, read an advisory rating scored against your own risk policy, then record your decision. The annexure and the audit trail are written as you go.
Verify onboards a client lawfully. Comply keeps the firm lawful.
The dividing line is the Act’s, not ours. Due diligence duties bite when a client relationship starts. The risk-programme, employee, monitoring and reporting duties run continuously, whether a new client arrives or not.
Onboard a client lawfully. One secure link, every check your risk policy requires, and a decision-ready file at the end of it.
For firms that want every new client screened, verified and documented properly at take-on.
Keep the firm lawful. Everything in Verify, plus the duties that run whether a new client arrives or not.
For firms that want their whole ongoing FICA practice carried: re-screening when lists change, employee screening, periodic reviews, registers and returns.
Three sources, and every feature answers to one of them.
A quiet month costs you nothing.
Verify has no subscription at all. Comply adds a monthly seat and takes 15 percent off every per-client rate. One itemised invoice at the end of each month, either way.
Rates read live from the firm settings. Verification checks are billed separately, at cost plus a small markup, and only when one actually runs, so you never pay for a check we did not do.
The reasons firms say no, answered.
Verify onboards a client lawfully: intake, identity, screening, an advisory rating against your own policy, and the annexure. Comply keeps the firm lawful: everything in Verify, plus the duties that run without a new client, like re-screening when the sanctions lists change, employee screening, periodic review, registers and returns. Verify is priced per client vetted. Comply is a monthly seat, and its per-client rates are 15 percent lower.
Every client file leaves Onvett as documents you keep: a firm-branded FICA annexure and a screening certificate, both downloaded into your own matter file at the time of the decision. The record a regulator asks for lives in your filing system, not only in ours.
There is nothing to migrate. Your existing files stay exactly where they are, and the next client you open uses an Onvett link. Firms start with one matter, not a rollout.
Upload the one you have. Onvett reads it, reports the gaps against a FICA requirement catalogue, and lets your compliance officer fix the wording before you approve and freeze a version. Scoring only runs against a frozen version, so you always know which policy produced a rating.
The rating is advisory and the attorney records the decision, so the decision on the file is the firm’s. The precise wording of this answer is a founder and compliance-advisor decision, not a design one.
Onvett produces the same record a manual file would, with a time-stamped trail of who did what. What may be claimed about acceptance is a founder and compliance-advisor decision, not a design one.
Never. The rating and the screening results are advisory and labelled as such. An attorney records every decision, and nothing is ever auto-approved, auto-blocked or auto-rejected.
No. Cash threshold reports and the Risk and Compliance Return are filed by your firm, through the FIC’s own channels. Onvett keeps the register, runs the three-working-day clock and pre-fills the worksheet.
Named parties are screened against the UN Consolidated list, the US OFAC SDN list and the EU Consolidated list, using fuzzy matching with similarity scores. Each list reports its own status, and a list we could not reach is flagged as not screened, never shown as a clean pass.
No. Clients receive a secure one-time link by email and complete a single intake form with no login. The link expires after use and cannot be reused or guessed.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest and stored in South Africa, with explicit client consent. Onvett is multi-tenant by design: each firm sees only its own clients, policy and brand, with no cross-firm visibility.
Open your next matter FICA-ready.
Onboard your first client in minutes. No card required to explore.