Mmeli Consulting

Financial Crime Prevention - how to effectively and efficiently mitigate your firm's risks The coordinated efforts and activities in the field of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) accelerated in 1989 when the Group of Seven nations launched the Financial Actions Task Force FATF in Paris. The accelerated pace of new standards in recent years force financial institutions to quickly assess the impacts on their financial crime frameworks as well as to update the underlying procedures and processes. The increasing number of criminal investigations of industry peers as well as payments for staggering fines for violating economic sanctions show the importance of a sound and robust financial crime prevention framework. Several stories of banks and non-financial businesses and professions illustrate the legal and reputational consequences of non-compliance with respective financial crime prevention laws. However, the challenges for financial institutions lie in transforming the national and international standards in financial crime prevention into daily operation. The risk-based approach in FATFs recommendations adds flexibility but also complexity and increases the challenges in defining a firm's financial crime framework. How to align procedures and processes in such a way that a financial institution's Compliance and Operations departments can manage detected alerts and suspicious activities? How to fine-tune the software solutions for monitoring, screening and searching transactions and customers to distinguish true hits from false alerts?