Transaction monitoring is an important aspect of compliance, as it helps financial institutions follow regulatory requirements and prevent illegal activities such as money laundering and terrorist financing. This article provides detailed information on transaction monitoring for banks and how it can be applied in your organization.
What is Transaction Monitoring?
Transaction monitoring is the process of monitoring customer transactions to detect suspicious activity. Software programs analyze customer transaction data and flag any suspicious transactions for further investigation.
Why is It Important for Banks?
Banks rely on monitoring transactions to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, such as the BSA, USA PATRIOT Act, and FATF recommendations. Failure to comply can lead to fines, license revocation, and reputational harm.
Monitoring transactions helps banks identify potential risks and threats early, saving money by detecting money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, and other financial crimes.
Challenges
Transaction monitoring is an AML/CFT rule in most jurisdictions but requires the collection and analysis of massive amounts of customer and transaction data. Banks must consider compliance challenges when implementing their solution.
Key transaction monitoring challenges include:
- Anonymity: Online transactions provide a level of privacy that in-person transactions do not. This feature may allow high-risk customers to conceal their identities while transacting.
- Speed: Money launderers may be able to use the speed of online banking services to move money between accounts and across borders while avoiding AML/CFT controls designed to alert banks to criminal activity.
- Scalability: Banks need a transaction monitoring solution that can grow in tandem with their operations. Manual monitoring and approval processes can be costly, slow operations, and frustrate customers.
- Structuring: Money launderers may seek to transact in specific amounts of money—below those designated limits—to avoid regulatory reporting thresholds. Structured transactions across many accounts may be used by money launderers to conceal their criminal strategy.
- Mules: To avoid AML/CFT measures and controls, some criminals may attempt to have third parties, or “money mules,” conduct transactions on their behalf. Money mules could be vulnerable members of society who have been bribed or coerced by criminals.
The Process of Transaction Monitoring
Data collection, analysis, alert generation, and investigation are all stages of monitoring transactions. Let’s look at each of these stages in more detail.
- Data Collection: Data collection is the first step in transaction monitoring and involves collecting customer transaction data from a variety of sources.
- Analysis: Data is analyzed using machine learning algorithms, statistical models, and rule-based systems to identify patterns and anomalies.
- Alert Generation: An alert is generated if suspicious transactions are detected, and the transaction is marked for further investigation.
- Investigation: A team of compliance professionals investigates a flagged transaction to determine if it is illegal or not.
Transaction Monitoring Software
Banks should consider implementing a software platform to help with monitoring transactions due to the amount of data involved and the potential for human error.
Automated monitoring tools such as OMNIO improve the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of transaction monitoring in banks, providing smart technology benefits such as risk categorization and prioritization algorithms. They may also include machine learning systems capable of detecting suspicious activity based on past customer behavior and adapting to new criminal methodologies.
