FircoSoft Vendor Highlights Report

<p>In the past, many firms felt powerless to prevent financial crime and simply wrote it off as the cost of doing business. In the last two decades, however, the combination of greater regulatory pressure and the increased costs of financial crime to firms have led to financial crime management becoming a much higher priority for firms.</p>

<p>In particular, regulators have put increased pressure on firms to do more to prevent terrorism financing, money laundering, corruption, and tax evasion. As these requirements have become stricter and the volume of transactions has increased, it has become ever more difficult for firms’ financial crime management systems to meet these requirements. The cost of failure has gone up, through higher regulatory fines and increased public scrutiny leading to greater reputational risk.</p>

<p>Firms need to adapt to this new world. In the past, they had focused on processing a relatively small number of transactions, on a batch basis, and accounts could be fairly easily traced. However, the rise of mobile and online banking has raised the volume of transactions, the speed at which they take place, and the ease of anonymity. These&nbsp; factors&nbsp; mean&nbsp; that&nbsp; firms&nbsp; need&nbsp; new&nbsp; approaches&nbsp; and&nbsp; technology&nbsp; systems&nbsp; for&nbsp; their&nbsp; anti-money&nbsp; laundering,&nbsp; anti-corruption,&nbsp; anti-terrorism&nbsp; financing,&nbsp; economic&nbsp; sanctions,&nbsp; and&nbsp; tax&nbsp; evasion&nbsp; programs.</p>

<p>The widening of regulatory scope has also increased the volume of transactions and accounts that need to be screened. This will place increased pressure on resources in organizations that rely on manual review and workflow&nbsp; processes,&nbsp; creating&nbsp; much&nbsp; higher&nbsp; costs,&nbsp; much&nbsp; lower&nbsp; efficiency,&nbsp; and&nbsp; greater&nbsp; operational&nbsp; risk.&nbsp; To&nbsp; process&nbsp; greater&nbsp; flows&nbsp; of&nbsp; information,&nbsp; firms&nbsp; will&nbsp; need&nbsp; technology&nbsp; solutions&nbsp; that&nbsp; have&nbsp; been&nbsp; specifically&nbsp; designed&nbsp; to&nbsp; meet&nbsp; current and future challenges of screening processes, providing the right balance of feature sophistication and high-volume processing ability.</p>

<p>As&nbsp; financial&nbsp; crime&nbsp; techniques&nbsp; evolve&nbsp; rapidly,&nbsp; state-of-the-art&nbsp; detection&nbsp; techniques&nbsp; with&nbsp; sophisticated&nbsp; filtering&nbsp; are necessary, with powerful, scalable screening abilities to enable the processing speed that operations require. Firms also want to avoid overwhelming volumes alerts generated by increased screening volumes. To meet the&nbsp; new&nbsp; filtering&nbsp; volumes,&nbsp; refined&nbsp; and&nbsp; flexible&nbsp; tuning&nbsp; of&nbsp; rules&nbsp; is&nbsp; required&nbsp; to&nbsp; minimize&nbsp; false&nbsp; positives&nbsp; and&nbsp; maintain&nbsp; manageable&nbsp; alert&nbsp; rates.&nbsp; Solutions&nbsp; also&nbsp; need&nbsp; a&nbsp; rapid&nbsp; ‘production&nbsp; mode’&nbsp; to&nbsp; eliminate&nbsp; false&nbsp; alerts&nbsp; quickly,&nbsp; while providing deeper investigation tools for potential true alerts. Automation of predictable steps should be considered, such as decision reapplication or routing alerts directly to the most appropriate reviewer.</p>

<p>This often&nbsp; means&nbsp; focusing&nbsp; on&nbsp; best-of-breed&nbsp; solutions,&nbsp; rather&nbsp; than&nbsp; ‘one-stop-shops’.&nbsp; While&nbsp; many&nbsp; firms&nbsp; want&nbsp; to&nbsp; improve&nbsp; their&nbsp; overall&nbsp; financial&nbsp; crime&nbsp; systems,&nbsp; they&nbsp; know&nbsp; from&nbsp; experience&nbsp; that&nbsp; broad&nbsp; implementations&nbsp; are&nbsp; costly&nbsp; and&nbsp; take&nbsp; time.&nbsp; Where&nbsp; firms&nbsp; have&nbsp; a&nbsp; specific&nbsp; need&nbsp; for&nbsp; improved&nbsp; screening,&nbsp; a&nbsp; specialized&nbsp; screening&nbsp; tool,&nbsp; with&nbsp; focused development of real-time scalable capabilities, may be preferable to a one-stop-shop vendor with less sophisticated screening capabilities.</p>

<p>This&nbsp; report&nbsp; covers&nbsp; the&nbsp; technology&nbsp; capabilities&nbsp; and&nbsp; systems&nbsp; that&nbsp; firms&nbsp; need&nbsp; to&nbsp; adapt&nbsp; to&nbsp; this&nbsp; changing&nbsp; environment,&nbsp; with&nbsp; a&nbsp; focus&nbsp; on&nbsp; watch-list&nbsp; filtering&nbsp; systems.&nbsp; The&nbsp; report&nbsp; covers&nbsp; new&nbsp; functionalities&nbsp; that&nbsp; firms&nbsp; need&nbsp; to&nbsp; implement&nbsp; to keep pace with technology changes and regulatory requirements, including real-time capabilities, risk-based approaches, and the ability to increase scale. This report also covers practices and technology solutions available from FircoSoft,&nbsp; a&nbsp; provider&nbsp; of&nbsp; watch-list&nbsp; filtering&nbsp; solutions.&nbsp; Chartis&nbsp; believes&nbsp; FircoSoft&nbsp; to&nbsp; be&nbsp; one&nbsp; of&nbsp; the&nbsp; leading&nbsp; vendors&nbsp; in&nbsp; the&nbsp; financial&nbsp; crime&nbsp; management&nbsp; marketplace.</p>

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• Topics
• Vendor analysis
• Quantitative Methods
• AI & Machine Learning
• Business Intelligence
• Data Management
• Financial Crime
• Risk & Data Technologies
• Anti-money laundering (AML)
• Watchlist monitoring