Is FinCrime management bolted onto or built into your workflow system?

An integrated IT system with analytics capabilities enables suspicious activity to be flagged and managed as it occurs.

In brief

• To monitor and detect financial crime, review teams rely on a huge amount of data from different sources within the organization.
• An IT platform with analytics capabilities can help manage these complex workflows and de-risk the delivery of business-critical processes and projects.
  
• As an example, EY Virtual has supported clients with various projects in the financial crime prevention space.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, global organizations face challenges in orchestrating complex processes across business units and regions. This applies also to financial crime-related processes such as client or vendor due diligence, surveillance alert reviews or client risk rating. Management is constantly challenged to maintain harmonized workflows while ensuring quality and efficiency at the same time. This challenge becomes even more profound when multiple parties are added to the mix due to processes involving other internal and external stakeholders.

Leading organizations have recognized the need to manage these complex workflows and de-risk the delivery of business-critical processes and projects. In our age of data-driven technology, the right IT solution can act as a powerful enabler of management and monitoring.

In this article, we explore some challenges financial institutions face in managing workflows. Drawing on our own experience with EY Virtual, our modular management and monitoring platform built to accelerate the digital transformation of clients’ legal and compliance programs, we also share insights into solutions.

Challenges

As part of their efforts to tackle financial crime, organizations need to perform investigations following suspicions of money laundering fraud bribery. This means that vast amounts of structured information and documents need to be collected, catalogued and reviewed.

Manual implementation and management of workflows can be time-consuming and prone to error. Moreover, the lack of an automated management system is likely to be a huge obstacle in tracking progress, making it harder to identify bottlenecks and potential issues on time, while the lack of standardization can lead to inconsistencies and mistakes.

In addition, managing multiple levels of access and collaboration on the same project can be complicated, leading to confusion and miscommunication, as well as enabling security risks that can only be mitigated with time consuming and costly access management procedures.

Finally, financial institutions invest heavily in tools and solutions at various levels of the organization but do not always leverage full reusability of work products developed for a project. This can result in wasted time and resources when developing similar projects in the future.

Solutions

All of the above challenges can be addressed by modern workflow platforms. These should ideally include features such as granular access management, in-built reporting and analytics capabilities, which add value beyond pure workload management.

With an in-built analytics module, an IT platform can be used to monitor transactions for fraud in real time. Data around any suspicious activity or transactions can then be collated directly and transmitted as a case for the review team. This seamless integration unlocks efficiencies and accelerates speed to action on suspicious cases.

In terms of setup, organizations should be able to choose whether to deploy their solution securely via the cloud or on-site. If organizations select an off-the-shelf solution, it should be customizable with a range of different features and built-in applications that enable speed-to-deployment and enhance management and monitoring capabilities according to the financial institution’s specific needs.​

Case studies

EY Virtual is a microservices-based workflow, AI and data analytics platform with sophisticated management and monitoring capabilities.​ In two case studies below, we illustrate some ways that clients have used it as part of their efforts to combat financial crime.

Risk assessment for a global financial group

A global financial group started its first-ever global inventory process of anti-bribery, anti-corruption, anti-money laundering and sanctions risk, covering over 2,000 individual sub-assessments across 45+ branches and 77 regions. This risk assessment process involved collecting 300+ data points from different client stakeholders across the global network, with a need to maintain a robust audit trial for regulatory reporting purposes. At the same time, it was paramount that teams across regions could work in parallel while maintaining consistency. EY deployed EY Virtual and developed a unique client-centric assessment space which would allow user-friendly web-based accessibility by all 2,000 individual sub-assessors, ensure process standardization and transparency, and enable results to be aggregated in a comprehensive and distinct manner. The streamlined workflow replaced highly manual processes, increasing efficiency, speeding up the assessments and reducing costs. 

FX conduct investigation for a tier 1 bank

A tier 1 bank was conducting a global investigation into FX market conduct in order to develop a comprehensive suite of risk indicators to detect trading strategies that potentially breached conflicts of interest and/or market abuse regulations. EY Virtual was deployed to provide both the infrastructure and the computation power to aggregate and consolidate 10+ billion data events, including trading transactions, client orders, sales data and market prices. AI and analytics solutions were then leveraged to identify patterns indicative of abuse against key risks and produce a low volume of highly relevant alerts.