Leading bank revamps anti-money laundering framework to reduce false positives by 20%

Highlights
  • Customer

    A financial institution specializing in core banking services

  • Industry

    Banking

Benefits
  • 80% reduction in process execution time
  • 50% increase in efficiency compared to what previous infrastructure offered
  • 20% reduction in false positives
  • Improved fraud detection through consistent identification and reporting
Business Situation

The Bank Secrecy Act makes it mandatory for financial institutions to monitor transactions to detect suspicious activity and screen customers against various watch-lists. The client was using Actimize application to monitor transactional/non-transactional data to detect any suspicious activity and Fircosoft application to screen customers against various watch-lists.

Business Challenges

The client's centralized Anti Money Laundering (AML) infrastructure had to be aligned to meet the specific local needs across diverse geographies. This meant launching a transaction and customer-monitoring platform that met the standards and best practices set by its global AML center of excellence. This translated into below listed key objectives:

  • Customizing Actimize application to identify and manage suspicious activities
  • Creating and implementing new set of rules for monitoring sources of bank transactions
  • Enhancing Fircosoft to screen customers against various watch list
  • Provide a reporting environment for cash processing across multiple locations
Birlasoft Solution

Birlasoft's process expertise in AML allowed it to quickly understand existing client applications (Actimize & Fircosoft) and recommend improvements to meet business needs. The solutions included following activities:

Actimize

  • Configuration of Actimize SAM (Suspicious Activity Monitoring) model to monitor suspicious activities within client portfolio
  • Creation of new Actimize detection rules (such as dormant accounts becoming active, threshold rules, etc.) to monitor inflow and outflow of funds
  • Implementation of Customer Risk Rating (CRR) process to generate alerts for suspicious activities
  • Upgradation of Risk Case Manager for better decision-making on suspicious accounts

Fircosoft

  • Configuration of Fircosoft to allow comparison of first name, last name, (or company name), address and country against global watch-lists (OFAC list, PEP list, adverse media or negative media list, etc.)
  • Conversion of watch-list data received from third parties to Fircosoft-compatible format through ETL
  • Tuning of Fircosoft algorithms and rules creation to reduce false positives.
  • Establishment of a process to ensure a client customer-base check every 14 days against the latest global watch-list & generation of a notification for the risk community when a new match is found.