Westpac has pledged to consolidate its disparate anti-money laundering systems into a single, group-wide, database, and to double the number of people in its financial crime unit, in response to regulatory accusations that it contravened AML/CTF laws on over 23 million occasions.

AxiomSL, the leading provider of regulatory reporting and risk management solutions, today announced completion of The Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type II audit of RegCloud that confirmed the effectiveness of the firm’s internal controls for compliance and data protection.

Accuity, the leading provider of financial crime compliance, payments and Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, and Chartis Research, the leading provider of research and analysis on risk technology markets, announced results of a study that revealed 66% of financial institutions face the significant challenge of achieving low false positive rates, putting unnecessary burden on their compliance departments and creating inefficiencies in their financial crime screening processes.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) today issued a set of legally binding requirements to raise the cyber security standards and strengthen cyber resilience of the financial sector.
The Notice on Cyber Hygiene sets out the measures that financial institutions must take to mitigate the growing risk of cyber threats.

Chainalysis, the blockchain analysis company, is working with Lendingblock, the institutional lending exchange for digital assets, to implement anti-money laundering technology and best practices in anticipation of global regulatory guidance from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

IBM and Thomson Reuters are fusing their AI and data expertise to help financial institutions meet regulatory compliance requirements. The new regtech offering will be delivered from the IBM Cloud and feature real-time financial services data from thousands of content sources.

Firco Automated Alert Reduction increases the accuracy and relevance of matches, helping reduce manual review times and curb the escalating costs of compliance

Accuity, the leading provider of financial crime compliance, payments, and Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, has announced its AI-driven account screening capability, ‘Firco Automated Alert Reduction’, which increases the level of accuracy in detecting and evaluating screening matches during the KYC process. It has also been optimised to integrate seamlessly with WorldCompliance™ data to expand its visibility into sanctions, politically exposed person (PEP) and adverse media lists, in support of compliance requirements.

This new module augments existing financial crime filters and alleviates a significant burden for organisations with large-scale compliance operations that rely heavily on human operators to review potential risks. Risks associated with customer accounts can include exposure to illicit financial activity, sanctioned entities, PEPs and reputationally exposed persons (REPs).

Existing matching technology compares customer data to the entities listed on regulatory watch lists, but until now, has not been sophisticated enough to eliminate the abundance of ‘false positive’ results produced, with the necessary level of accuracy. Manually assessing alerts to determine quality, potential risk, and whether further investigation is required, has been a significant drain on compliance resources and a contributor to the rising costs of compliance across the industry.

According to the recent Chartis Research Financial Crime Risk Management Systems: AML and Watchlist Monitoring report, “the success of an AML system is usually measured by the amount of time it saves and its reduction of false positives.”