In a situation of heightened Regulatory Oversight in the fight against Money Laundering across the world, organizations operating in the Financial Services vertical are coming under tighter controls. Banking and Non-Banking Financial Institutions and Service providers are mandated to protect their organizations from Launderers and are required to report any potential misuse of the system to regulatory authorities.
AMLOCK is an automated Anti Money Laundering Solution that assists reporting organizations in complying with regulatory requirements under the Anti Money Laundering regimes. It offers financial institutions of different sizes, a means to detect and investigate suspicious transactions, ensure compliance with regulatory KYC norms, and a host of valuable investigation and analysis tools to aid the compliance officer in performing his duties effectively and with ease. AMLOCK facilitates ingestion of data from multiple source systems, thus enabling a single view of the customer across products and services. The ingestion can be real-time where blocking of transactions is required, or can be scheduled at stipulated intervals.
AMLOCK caters to:
Regulatory Reporting is facilitated by AMLOCK by way of auto-population of the required regulatory reports CTRs and STRs while also providing for the input of comments of the Compliance Officer, wherever required. Respecting the mobility of resources and the consequent location neutrality required, AMLOCK extends the facility of SMS and e-mail Alerts to specified recipients, besides being an access controlled browser based solution.
Customer Due Diligence is one of the foremost requirements in an AML program to deter miscreants from entering the financial system. AMLOCK provides tools such as:
List Screening for screening blacklisted entities. It supports both published lists or the Blacklists and internal control lists termed the Watchlists.
Compliance Scores for KYC to monitor the levels of adherence. This helps in updating the KYC levels of existing customers and serves as a handy audit tool.
Duplicate checks to fish out undisclosed multiple accounts. This may relate to the same or multiple products or locations and is very handy when there are multiple source systems.
Link Tracer and Grouping for identifying hidden relationships between customers so as to enable enhanced monitoring over a group of people who appear to be connected or acting in concert.
Transaction monitoring tools to identify suspicious activity is central to the AML compliance facilitation offered by AMLOCK. Features that assist in identifying, prioritizing and monitoring potential suspicions include –
Risk Categorization, which facilitates focusing on activities of higher risk customers by segregating them on the basis of money laundering risks. Acknowledging the diversity in the quantification of risk, AMLOCK provides for a parameter-driven risk module.
Profiling to judge what is abnormal or suspicious, normal behavior has to be established. This is aided by the Profiling facility that tracks the changes in identification attributes as also the transactions patterns.
Benchmarking facilitates defining global or specific tolerances in transaction behavior. This enables the demarcation between normal and potentially suspicious deviations in the account activity.
Pre-defined Industry specific Alert Scenarios of AMLOCK enable identification of established typologies. There are three variants: Red Flags (Online Alerts), which are based on single transaction and are triggered at the time of data ingestion. Aggregated Alerts (Offline Alerts), which consider several attributes and / or a specified period of time and are scheduled as per the required periodicity. Subjective Alerts which facilitate the recording of non-transaction based suspicions.
Visual Event Response Builder (VERB) is a Rules Engine to introduce suspicions based on the unique experiences in the geography, industry or institution. This enables the user to set / define conditions that would qualify individually or in combination with other conditions qualify a transaction or a set of transactions as suspicious.
Alerts assignment enables the distribution of workload between the resources in the compliance team and also in ensuring that resources with the appropriate expertise address the Alerts raised.
Alert resolution facilitates the closure of an Alert as non-suspicious without further investigation. To back this decision, notes can be appended to the Alert.
Case Management tool of AMLOCK provides the Workflow management and case tracking for those Alerts for which further investigation is called for by the users. Different resources can be assigned for investigation and reviewing the case. Evidence can be attached and Case identicals can be identified based on select attributes. Should there be a requirement for a legal investigation, the Legal track facilitates the recording of court proceedings as well as attachment of evidence. Controlled access through Access rights and User hierarchy management offer the security standards desired by industry.
Analytical tools such as Transaction Viewing Center with drill down facilities, Flip Tables for multi-dimensional view of the customer’s activities and Alert Weights to focus on the most critical and persistent customer Alerts facilitate comprehensive investigation.
Reporting comprises two major types – Compliance Reporting and Management Reporting. With respect to Regulatory Reporting AMLOCK supports CTRs and STRs of different legal jurisdictions and facilitates the process of reporting by auto-populating the Reports and electronic filing in countries where this is required / mandated. A number of inbuilt Management Reports are shipped with AMLOCK.
All user and system activity is maintained in an audit trail and a robust archival facilitates the desired record-keeping.