SWIFT Launches Tool to Combat Financial Crime
SWIFT has launched Compliance Analytics, a business intelligence tool in its compliance services suite to help banks monitor and address financial crime risk.
It will enable them to analyse their own SWIFT traffic data to identify anomalies in behaviour, unusual patterns or trends in traffic flows, hidden relationships, and significant levels of activity in high-risk areas.
The new tool gives banks access to a single source of standardised data, providing them with an overview of their SWIFT-based activity, including their subsidiaries’ activities and all their activity with correspondents. The application will enable banks to identify and assess areas of risk, validate existing processes, and attain a global view of their SWIFT traffic. The application also allows banks to develop risk models, set alerts to highlight specific areas of risk within their business, and benchmark themselves against their industry peers.
“There are increasingly high expectations for financial institutions [FIs] to implement policies and tools that will help identify and prevent financial crime activities,” saidLuc Meurant, head of banking markets and compliance services at SWIFT.
“Compliance Analytics enables banks to analyse their existing SWIFT traffic data to detect spikes, outliers or possible policy breaches. This is a great new tool that can help alleviate some of the financial crime compliance challenges impacting the banking community.”
SWIFT added that the new tool is relevant to a broad audience within banks, including group compliance, anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions, correspondent banking, audit, and risk teams. It complements SWIFT’s existing sanctions screening and sanctions testing services, as well as its know your customer (KYC) registry initiative which will go live at the end of the year.