Mitigating suspicious activities and money laundering across Mashreq
Mashreq is one of the UAE’s leading financial institutions with a growing presence in the region comprising Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain & other international locations namely US, UK, India & Hong Kong. Since 1967, Mashreq has been providing banking and financial services including a wide range of innovative products and services to millions of customers and businesses.
One of the top performing banks in the region, Mashreq is committed to maintain its leading position in the UAE’s banking sector. The company has strong customer service centres in key locations and has one of the largest ATM networks in the country.
SAS® Anti-Money Laundering is a powerful solution that provides relevant information to conduct preliminary analyses and identify potential illicit financial activity that warrants attention. By using SAS Anti-Money Laundering solution, we are able to allocate time to critical cases that need our immediate attention.
Nadeem Humayun
Senior Manager Compliance and MLRO, AML and Sanctions Unit, Mashreq
Complying with the Anti-Money laundering regulations of various jurisdictions in which it operates, Mashreq deployed anti-money laundering solutions across its branches in the country as well as its overseas locations in 2006 & chose SAS as the preferred vendor partner to implement its Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solution.
“Being in the banking sector wherein we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of transactions per day, it is very difficult for us to holistically monitor suspicious or illegal customer activities. We had to deploy an innovative automated AML system to guarantee that our internal infrastructure and control systems are able to timely detect potential money-laundering activities,” said Nadeem Humayun, Mashreq.
As part of the banks constant endeavour to continuously enhance and fine tune the capabilities of the system to keep in line with the ever changing regulatory environment, Mashreq in collaboration with SAS have successfully undertaken and completed a major overhaul of the SAS AML 4.2 system implemented here.
The capabilities available within the SAS system have ensured a monitoring at a granular level by applying the relevant thresholds which in turn have helped the bank in tracking the multitude of customers and their portfolios across these business groups in an effective and a more efficient manner. Mashreq has handpicked and implemented 8 new scenarios from the SAS scenario catalogue.
SAS has enabled Mashreq to enhance its scope of monitoring by specifically targeting the Correspondent banking relationships by implementing scenarios which cater to this requirement and to conduct perpetual screening Mashreq’s set of customers against the World Check Premium file with specific consideration given to the updates for fields identified as Critical, ensuring quality alerts.
Challenge
Aligning and complying with the Anti-Money laundering regulations across all jurisdictions locally & internationally, Mashreq required a pan geographic Anti-Money Laundering solution to cater to the ever changing regulatory landscape
Solution
Benefits
Using SAS Anti-Money Laundering, Mashreq has been able to:
- Monitor large volumes of transactions and multiple risks by adding numerous scenarios and risk factors.
- Reduce false positives with accurate predictive alert analytics to identify actions and relationships that present the greatest risk.
- Reduce anti-money laundering compliance costs.
- Incorporate data management best practices from more than a hundred successful applications for faster implementation time.