The client offers a fully automated all-in-one compliance platform for the global investments industry. They serve financial services providers with automated compliance solutions that enable regulatory protection, reduce risks, and bring down operating costs.
The company aims to deliver thorough, unparalleled expertise in risk and compliance experiences to its clients.
The need to simplify financial compliance processes
As financial services providers globally, are facing unprecedented levels of money laundering risks, the client wanted a robust platform that helped its clients efficiently detect, investigate, and report suspected money laundering activities within its employees,’ clients,’ correspondents,’ and third parties’ accounts in transactions across all business lines.
The client wanted a more integrated and comprehensive solution that made compliance easier to manage. The organization wanted the solution to enable smart money laundering detection and ensure that the reference data is comprehensive and covers accounts reported by all geographies and security agencies. The client deliberated its compliance management system and determined challenges associated with a streamlined process to investigate and report non-compliance:
Spreadsheet-based reconciliation to identify money laundering was time-consuming and costly: One of the most vital challenges for the financial services providers was to detect, investigate, and produce reports of non-compliance activities after scanning the names on OFAC and FinCEN lists, and others provided by governments of select countries. They ran scans with the help of spreadsheets. The process was time-consuming, costly, and sometimes gave flawed results.
Keeping data updated was a tedious task: As the existing lists update, the quantity of data rapidly grew surpassing the technical and financial innovations. The system lacked the capacity to scale and match paces with increasing amount of data.
Obsolete lookup criteria: Compliance staff often missed hard-to-detect patterns of non-compliance activities. The system lacked the capabilities to run lookups and reports efficiently and intuitively on accounts. For example, the system scanned and detected accounts that matched 100%. There were lesser chances to match data based on fuzzy logic or phonetic search.
Holistic solution that is easy to use and dynamic enables smart detection, investigation, and reporting
The client wanted a solution that analyzed the behavior of clients, employees, prospects, and partners in every transaction across the enterprise, hence clearly understanding potential financial threats. The client spelled out its expectations and provided a roadmap to a more holistic, integrated compliance platform.
As the client’s technology advisor, Persistent re-engineered and re-platformed the compliance system, which is now robust, easy-to-use, scalable, dynamic and at reduced costs. The solution provides a powerful platform to cater core functionalities that are critical for an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance system. The solution helped the client:
Automate processes to scan the entire enterprise: The solution provides automated and consistent enterprise-wide surveillance of all employees, clients, and third parties across all channels and business lines. The solution allows organizations to effortlessly comply with national and international financial compliance mandates based on scanning the lists issued by OFAC and FinCEN and others provided by governments and countries globally. The system automatically flags and reports suspicious financial and trading activities such as suspiciously large transactions, unusual trading patterns, etc.
Detect suspicious transactions quickly: One hallmark of the closely integrated system is its ability to quickly detect suspicious transactions or behavior. For example, if some employee routinely makes a certain number of trades, the system will quickly detect and report if they increase their trading activity dramatically. The report helps compliance officers get complete information to trigger the next course of action, thereby reducing costs and increasing the quality of compliance.
Enable ease of use and configuration: Laws and regulations change, and lists keep getting updated. The solution anticipates the dynamic environment of financial compliance and is designed to be flexible, easy to use and configure.
Provide long-term cost effectiveness: The system is highly scalable and corresponds to the surging amount of data every day. The system is cost-effective for the client to maintain over the years.
Solution goals
- Enterprise-wide monitoring, investigations, and reporting
- Reduce compliance costs
- Address regulatory requirements
- Save time, reduce staff costs, and efficiently manage risk by detecting unusual behaviors
Persistent provided a proven, scalable, and cost-effective solution to help the client and its patrons streamline financial compliance initiatives. The easy configurability of the solution coupled with smart business logic accelerated the speed of its operations.
