Doing business in Greater China requires many companies to have more complex relationships with the government than they probably have in other regions. For financial institutions (FIs), the complexity creates a material compliance risk, as the global anti-money laundering (AML) rules on providing services to politically-exposed persons (PEPs) are complicated by an abundance of state-owned entity executives, a high-risk of corruption and multiple competing regulatory regimes.
May 4th, 2017
Faster payments took center stage at NACHA Payments 2017 in Austin last week – but open banking was the undercurrent that bubbled up and consumed much of the conversation during the event.
May 3rd, 2017
Already, financial institutions in the UK are familiarizing themselves more closely with the concepts and functions of “ring fencing” – a type of asset protection scheme that is soon to be required by law and which seems to be overlapping a lot of different channels in terms of its effects on risks and protections.
May 2nd, 2017
The realm of anti-money laundering (AML) and know your client (KYC) compliance has increasingly come under the public spotlight over the last few years due to high-profile sanctions fines for financial institutions across the globe. Regulators are also scrutinizing holdings and ownership details as part of a crackdown on tax evasion and fraud, further compelled by the release of the Panama Papers in 2016. Accordingly, the European Council adopted a directive on December 6, 2016, that grants access for tax authorities to beneficial ownership information held by national regulators responsible for the prevention of money laundering.
April 25th, 2017
Financial institutions have been devoting considerable time and effort to move from a product-centric to a customer-centric orientation. Key to this strategic shift is achieving a single customer view (SCV), whereby information on all of a customer’s product relationships as well as interactions with the institution are readily available to both systems and personnel.
April 20th, 2017
The Foreign Exchange (FX) market, one of the world’s largest financial markets, continues to face increasing regulatory scrutiny. Clearly, regulators are in agreement that deep and lasting change is still needed, especially as they review the findings of the aftermath of the various 2013-2014 global market manipulation events. FX market manipulation issues at the time were so prevalent, that global fines hit upwards of $10 Billion US.
April 19th, 2017
Back in December, we released a whitepaper with NICE Actimize that took a hard look at financial crimes investigations and asked a basic question: How can technology help transform a process that remains stubbornly manual, time-consuming, and expensive? The argument we advanced—based on NICE Actimize survey data—is that investigations today still involve a significant number of rules-based tasks that do not necessarily require direct human oversight. The process is therefore fertile ground for the application of a wide array of automation strategies, ranging from the relatively basic (pre-populating fields in a regulatory filing) to the fairly complex (using machine learning to perform alert risk scoring)
April 14th, 2017
Money laundering and terrorism financing are matters of global concern, but application of global standards to fight these financial crimes can differ greatly when it comes to the role of lawyers. While the US legal community has for several years resisted more aggressive anti-money laundering (AML) obligations, the United Kingdom has become a leader.