Preventing crime and ensuring
compliance at 120 Nordic banks
SAS helps financial institutions to stay compliant
Stay compliant
Money laundering through banks by organised criminals is a global concern and on the rise.
SDC achieved this using • SAS® Anti-Money Laundering • SAS® Visual Analytics • SAS® Customer Due Diligence
SDC enables small and medium financial institutions in four countries in the Nordics to stay compliant
Money laundering through banks by organised criminals is a global concern and on the rise. As a result, banks are facing increasing regulatory pressure at both a local and international level.
SDC is an IT-service provider for 120 banks in the Nordic region. Suzan Moos is a business analyst and developer at SDC. Suzan must ensure that SDC can provide the same level of governance infrastructure to its affiliated banks, as the largest banks in the region. She has worked in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and fraud for more than 10 years.
Having a centralised governance and oversight system makes it easier to search, define and correct errors as well as implement new scenarios and changes for several customer banks, she points out. This saves the banks a lot of resources but the system still allows for individual tailoring for each clients’ specific needs.
SDC and SAS are long-term partners, and Suzan has followed the development of the AML solution for years. In 2014, she helped oversee the implementation of SAS AML 5.1 across the four Nordic countries. The latest upgrade came in late 2017 with SAS AML 7.1.
“SAS AML 7.1 is fantastically intuitive and I really like the plentiful possibilities in the system. I think others agree: When we were just getting started, a new employee at one of the banks told me that he thinks one can see a lot more information in the new version.”
As a provider of data and IT solution services, SDC is not ultimately responsible for whether an individual bank complies with legislation and maintains compliance standards. It is the bank’s own responsibility to implement robust AML compliance programs. However, for Suzan it is essential that SDC provides guidance and counselling to its clients on this complex topic and offers reliable solutions to minimise the problem.
My role can be described as being an intermediary between our clients, the banks, and our developers here at SDC. Within anti-money laundering, the legal requirements are the same for small banks as for large banks. This gives larger banks an advantage. At SDC, we have worked to make a communal service based on SAS® Anti-Money Laundering that our customers can use to obtain the highest level of complianceSuzan Moos Business analyst and developer SDC
One of the big problems in AML detection is a large number of wrong alerts, or so-called non-productive alerts. According to Suzan, it is hard to give a general answer as to how the AML system is alleviating this problem, due to the diversity of SDC’s client group.
“It all depends on the individual setup in the banks but there is no doubt that with the proper set-up of scenarios, the alarms will be more correct and there will probably be less false positives. Right now, we collect all Know Your Customer (KYC) data in SAS Visual Analytics and allow the banks to find customer profiles and make more specific surveillance, for example to investigate for terrorists.”
Looking to the future, Suzan is interested in two new initiatives: The first one is real-time semantics that would allow for automated alerts on improper conduct. An example is flagging a customer trying to make a money transfer to a country that is subject to international sanctions.
The second initiative is using SAS Visual Investigator to give a 360-degree view of their customers to bank personnel.
“Ideally, in time we will have one system, and one entity that can help us determine: Who is this person? Using this for our Customer Due Diligence is on our road map for next year”.
At SDC, we have been thinking eight to 10 years ahead,” Moos says. “We are really one of the first technology partners in the world that can provide smaller banks the quality of anti-money laundering surveillance that only the largest players in the financial market would otherwise be able to musterSuzan Moos Business analyst and developer SDC
SDC– Facts & Figures
120
financial institutions
9500
employees in the financial institutions
3,6 milions
customers in SDC financial institutions
The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.