What is a “Digital Wolfsberg”?
When people say Digital Wolfsbergs, they refer to a digital version of the Wolfsberg Questionnaire. The Wolfsberg Group (an association of global banks) publishes two widely used due‑diligence questionnaires:
- CBDDQ: Correspondent Banking Due Diligence Questionnaire
- FCCQ: Financial Crime Compliance Questionnaire (a broader, cross‑industry questionnaire)
Banks, payment companies, and other financial institutions use these questionnaires to assess a counterparty’s financial crime controls across AML/CFT, sanctions, KYC, screening, monitoring, and governance. Traditionally, the questionnaire is circulated as a document or PDF. A Digital Wolfsberg converts every question and answer into structured data so teams can review online, analyse, compare versions, and feed downstream systems.
Why it’s needed
- Faster reviews: No rekeying from PDFs. Validation rules reduce back‑and‑forth and missing fields.
- Version control: Compare the current submission to last year’s; instantly see what changed and why.
- Auditability: A digital trail of who answered what, when, and what evidence was provided.
- Collaboration: Compliance, front office, and KYC teams can work from the same live record.
- Portability: Export to Excel for committees and attach to files in CLM systems via API.
- Red Flags: extract key questions and flag high-risk responses.
Common problems with document-based Wolfsbergs
- Manual effort to extract data from static PDFs into spreadsheets
- Inconsistent answers across counterparties
- Difficult to spot subtle changes year on year
- Limited ability to tag, filter, or run analytics
How BankCheck helps
BankCheck provides digitised versions of Wolfsberg Questionnaires covering both the CBDDQs and FCCQs.
What you can do with BankCheck
- Turn any Wolfsberg Questionnaire into a clean, structured digital record—whether it’s in BankCheck, in the SWIFT KYC Registry (via the BankCheck integration), or a PDF you upload to the BankCheck digitiser.
- Download the completed Wolfsberg Questionnaire as an Excel sheet for easy committee review or offline analysis
- Compare versions side by side to highlight additions, removals, or changed answers
- Automatically flag and route high‑risk (“red flag”) answers using rules you set—for example, links to shell companies, activity in high‑risk sectors such as money services businesses, crypto, or casinos, presence in high‑risk jurisdictions, or missing core compliance controls. The system also suggests likely red flags when responses imply risk, including exposure to correspondent banking via downstream respondents, client relationships in high‑risk sectors, or dealings with shell companies.
- Attach evidence to specific questions (policies, SOC/ISO certificates, etc.)
- Create a risk score based on your methodology, with weighted sections and mandatory knockout items
- Maintain an audit trail and renewal reminders with full version history
- Integrate via API to CLM and case‑management tools; or keep it simple with Excel exports
What’s in the CBDDQ and FCCQ?
- Governance and FCC program: oversight, policies, risk assessment cadence
- KYC and onboarding: identification, verification, beneficial ownership, screening sources
- Sanctions: filtering tools, lists used, alert handling, payment interdiction
- Transaction monitoring: scenarios, tuning, QA, model validation
- PEPs and adverse media screening procedures: definitions, systems, coverage
- AML/CFT training, quality assurance, audit, and metrics
- Correspondent banking specifics (for CBDDQ): respondent categories, payable‑through accounts, nested relationships, cash management, clearing, message formats
Who benefits
- Correspondent banking and FI relationship teams
- Fintechs and payment institutions that must provide or review WQs
- Compliance testing, internal audit, and second‑line oversight
- Vendor risk and third‑party due‑diligence teams leveraging FCCQ content
Frequently asked questions
Is the digital version accepted by counterparties and regulators?
The underlying content is the official Wolfsberg CBDDQ/FCCQ. Digitisation simply structures it for better review. You can export the completed WQ to the familiar Excel/PDF if needed.
Are you part of the Wolfsberg Group?
No. BankCheck is independent and not affiliated with the Wolfsberg Group. We work with most of the Group’s 12 member banks as clients and provide structured digital versions of the publicly available Wolfsberg questionnaires.
What if we already have last year’s PDF?
We can ingest past questionnaires to seed the first digital version, enabling immediate change‑detection in the next cycle.
Key takeaways
- A Digital Wolfsberg turns a static compliance document into reusable, analysable data.
- BankCheck’s digital CBDDQ and FCCQ save time, improve risk insight, and make audits easier.
- Excel export, version comparison, and red‑flag detection bridge the gap between diligence and decision.
Want to see it in action? Request a short demo. We’ll show a live CBDDQ, download it as Excel, and compare this year’s questionnaire with last year’s in under 10 minutes.
