In today's rapidly evolving regulatory environment, financial institutions face mounting pressure to comply with a growing list of international sanctions and anti-money laundering regulations. Sanction and screening services are essential in mitigating risks related to money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud and other illicit activities.
Our client, a German multinational investment bank, wanted to address these issues and establish a robust system for identifying 'potential hits', ensuring compliance with sanctions and mitigating global regulatory risks.
The Challenge
Overcoming compliance challenges in global sanctions and transaction screening
The challenges faced by the bank were threefold, compounded by the need to manage cross-border transactions, multi-currency systems and diverse compliance frameworks. Some of the key challenges faced were as follows:
- Scanning all outgoing and incoming transactions to identify high-risk entities.
- Ensuring adherence to evolving global sanctions and regulatory requirements.
- Safeguarding the bank's global operations and workforce against compliance breaches.
The Objective
Strengthening compliance and risk mitigation through streamlined sanctions screening
We aimed to streamline the sanctions screening process, improve risk mitigation strategies and ensure compliance with local and international regulations. Our goal was to reduce operational disruptions, prevent regulatory penalties and protect its reputation.
The Solution
Enhancing risk mitigation with offshore support and IT solutions
Our multi-dimensional approach focused on improving efficiency and accuracy across global operations. To strengthen the compliance process and responsiveness to sanctions, our solution included the following process :
- Deployment of an offshore team for L1 reviews, resolving flagged sanctions and embargoing hits and escalating unresolved cases to L2 and L3 surveillance.
- Enhancement of IT applications for sanctions monitoring, enabling periodic reviews and compliance with global regulations.
- Establishment of a robust quality assurance framework for compliance accuracy across workflows.
The Impact
Driving alert management efficiency and optimizing process
Our solution demonstrated the power of expert-led processes in streamlining complex workflows, ensuring sustained performance and supporting a robust compliance framework. This led to remarkable outcomes, which are:
- Successfully managed a significant number of alerts monthly with swift processing, reducing operational spending by a notable margin while ensuring 100% SLA compliance during global disruptions.
- Reduction of overall operational spending by 30% with a scalable and SLA-driven operating model.
- Achieved consistent operational continuity and zero SLA misses, demonstrating resilience and adaptability even during challenging global disruptions.
