In the dynamic realm of compliance and risk management, organizations face a constant challenge: how to stay ahead of ever-evolving regulations while maximizing efficiency and effectiveness. As businesses grapple with the intricacies of compliance, it becomes increasingly apparent that traditional approaches are no longer sufficient. Instead, a paradigm shift is necessary – one that embraces innovation and forward-thinking strategies to become the modern compliance office.
Getting a complete view of compliance risk
If you face the challenge of accurately assessing customer risk profiles, you’re not alone. Current models rely on static data collected at account opening, resulting in inaccurate risk ratings, leading to unnecessary reviews, increased costs, and diluted anti-money laundering (AML) results. In addition, manual calibration of these models takes an enormous effort yet provides only periodic snapshots of customer profiles, exacerbating the problem.
AML solutions that improve your confidence in customer risk assessment and save review time do so by providing a unified view of compliance risk that dynamically calculates risk levels based on various factors such as customer information, products, channels, geographic location(s), entity ownership, the nature of business relationships, and activity feeds from different systems.
Redefining list management
While regulatory lists rightly require attention, the management of internal lists is often overlooked due to manual procedures and lack of resources to document changes over time. Organizations need to maintain proprietary lists for both “high-risk entities”, the customers that need additional surveillance, and “safe-to-do-business” lists that trigger false alarms.
Yet, as organizations strive to maintain integrity and transparency, the importance of internal list management cannot be understated. Effective maintenance of these lists spans across frequency of updates, approval process for addition and removal of entries, updating remediation notes for change of status, and documenting this procedure. Implementing robust systems that track changes of profiles in internal lists as meticulously as regulatory lists offer advanced regulatory reporting, transparency and accountability which can help you improve efficiency across your AML compliance program.
Empowering productivity
In an era marked by resource constraints and heightened scrutiny, productivity is paramount. Measuring productivity is also crucial to pinpoint problems and potential improvement areas. By leveraging enhanced productivity reports, you can see more information on average review time, matches cleared, and status assignment, helping you to see opportunities to optimize your processes, identify inefficiencies, and allocate resources more effectively.
Embracing proactive communication
Effective communication lies at the heart of successful AML compliance initiatives. From a case management perspective, email notifications to provide greater control over the case review process. In addition to triggering email notifications when cases go unreviewed for a certain number of days, email and push notifications can be sent every time the final remediation status changes and provide a detailed final status notification. This ensures stakeholders stay informed and engaged, facilitating collaboration, transparency, and efficiency.
Innovating the list review process
Reviewing critical sanctions and customer lists lies at the center of AML compliance efforts. However, the traditional process takes only a client-centric perspective, limiting your visibility to the client and the list records to which they match. By also incorporating a compliance-centric view, and conducting list reviews based on the importance of the list, you can streamline your efforts and enhance overall effectiveness. For example, alerts for similarly-named clients can be cleared quickly in this view, such as subsidiaries of the same organization, where updates to one compliance list record could reopen a large number of matches.