In an age where cyberattacks and money laundering are becoming more commonplace, the need for cutting-edge tech in AML is becoming ever more important.
With bad actors and state-sponsored threat groups bringing new challenges to protecting against money laundering, there has become a need for companies to innovate more than ever to support AML.
Remonda Kirketerp-Møller – CEO of Muinmos – believes that while areas such as compliance can be simplified through RegTech solutions, the AML space is a lot murkier.
She said, “The AML sector is drowning with many different providers and the key players are typically white labelling their solutions to other companies. I believe there are pros and cons of this.
“On the positive side, key providers are scaling through partnership models and the same dataset is being used by many organisations. There is no need to keep re-inventing the wheel. On the negative side, those selling white-label solutions have little control over the product and often don’t have the in-depth specialist knowledge when selling it.
“Sometimes, however, data aggregators are able to drive innovation. For example, if they find deficiencies in a product they are reselling, they can be inspired to invest in the development of a new, improved product to address these issues.”
In the opinion of Kirketerp-Møller, the technology needs to be intuitive as it increasingly needed in a wide range of sectors, not just limited to financial services.
She added, “AML touches on nearly every sector today as people are laundering money through products. Art galleries for example, are seeing a greater need for it as they are increasingly under attack. These sectors shouldn’t need to rely on an army of compliance experts or lawyers. They should have access to easy-to-use technology solutions to meet their ongoing needs.”
What technologies could drive innovation in the area of AML? Gion-Andri Büsser, CEO of RegTech firm IMTF, believes one key area could lie in intelligent process automation.
He detailed, “Given that still the majority of compliance cost originates from manual processing, improvements in the process space can significantly increase efficiencies and reduce costs. ML and other new developments in the space can help increase the advances even further and deduce behavioural effects.”
Likewise is the area of data aggregation and data sharing. He suggested that data aggregation is key to better KYC processes and more importantly an improved view on client risk. This, he claims, not only allows to better identify real threats but also reduce unnecessary, non-risky review processes.
The third key area is platform development. Büsser remarked, “Thinking about financial risk solutions from a platform perspective allows to build-out new use cases quickly and integrate third-party sources at (almost) zero cost.”
