Challenge: Ensuring All Business Units and Regions Adhere to the Same High Standards
Due to the complexities and cost of managing an increasing number of anti-money laundering (AML) regulatory requirements, a multi-national insurance and asset management company with 20 business units across seven countries sought to consolidate their compliance processes and systems. Corporate-wide standardization had become difficult because each country was using a different data provider and screening solution
Solution: Standardization Using a Single Vendor Solution
The company wanted to implement a single source solution to ensure that all business units in all regions followed the same screening processes and adhered to the same high standards. Due to regional data privacy regulations, the company required two separate on-premise solutions for its two compliance hubs in the US and Europe. In addition, due to country-specific data privacy regulations, a local server was required for three different satellite locations. Finally, the single source solution needed to be fast and easily scalable to meet the company’s anticipated record volume growth – estimated to surpass one hundred million records in the next few years – while still meeting the required processing windows.
After a careful evaluation, the company selected FinScan as their solution for screening customers, partners, and other associates against sanctions, Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), and adverse media data. FinScan offered the most flexibility and speed of implementation, rapid processing, and the scalability the company sought to accommodate their specific business needs and high growth across all regions.
Result: Savings in Costs and Resources – and a Significant Reduction in False Positives
Today, the organization has gone from using seven screening systems to a single unified FinScan solution. A global compliance team in Europe sets the overall strategy and procedures for all 20 business units. The company now has in place centralized oversight controls to easily deal with escalated cases and create reporting across all jurisdictions. Local compliance teams are responsible for client data, review of potential hits, and compliance activities in their corresponding regions. This allows the chief compliance officer to monitor and identify overall trends and gaps, while still leveraging the local knowledge and adhering to the strict data privacy laws for specific countries and regions. In addition, he has a consolidated view of all business units globally and is able to use this information to adjust their matching algorithm and plan resources accordingly.
With FinScan, the organization has been able to achieve substantial cost savings, as well as increased efficiency in support and maintenance. More importantly, they saw a threefold reduction in false positives due to FinScan’s advanced, configurable matching algorithm, compared to their previous solutions.