IMTF, Bateleur Software, which positions itself as the world's leading anti-financial crime platform, and the Compliance Institute of Southern Africa have shed light on complex money laundering networks and how advanced technology can uncover them, during a recent roadshow to Namibia and Botswana.
Lizette Sander, Product Manager at Bateleur Software, says southern African organisations are under pressure to improve their efficiencies in anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism compliance, particularly as South Africa seeks to exit its FATF greylisting.
Rianné Potgieter, CEO of the Compliance Institute Southern Africa, says the professional body, which is a member of IFCA, staged its first in-person networking roadshow in Namibia and Botswana. “With around 90 attendees in Namibia and over 70 people registered in Botswana, these were among the biggest in-person events people have seen from a compliance community perspective, despite the fact that flooding in Botswana impacted the proceedings,” she says.
Potgieter says the roadshow highlighted that compliance officers must stay abreast of emerging trends and solutions to combat financial crime worldwide. “Our events offer thought leadership but also help our members to think about what new skills they need in this developing world. For example, understanding what new technologies are available and learning AI prompting are becoming important in our sector,” she says.
The roadshow showcased solutions such as IMTF’s Siron One, which offers a holistic approach to financial crime compliance, leveraging data and technology for real-time, AI-powered decision-making. Siron One combines the best of two worlds – AI and machine learning – with a rule-based approach to calculate risk scores, prioritise alerts and reduce false positives.
Connecting the dots and uncovering layers
The roadshow also highlighted the value of connecting the dots between suspicious entities and accounts to uncover money laundering in a visual way.
Heike Jennewein, Presales Director at IMTF, noted that advanced network analysis with visual reporting helps compliance officers speed up investigations.
She demonstrated how IMTF network analysis software helps organisations visualise relationships within their data, which would not be apparent in traditional monitoring methods.
With link analysis, organisations are able to generate a “simple” visualisation of relations based on data such as addresses, phone numbers, devices and relation types, as well as transaction information and payment flows. This helps to speed up alert and case investigation through visualisation of relations between entities and provides insights to understand the activities of customers immediately.
Link analysis using data of multiple scoring runs offers more comprehensive insights, revealing complex economic networks of individuals, groups, beneficial owners or countries through multiple transaction flows, where transactions may be routed around and the relations between the entities are not obvious at first.
Jennewein says: “I have a feeling that there may be a lack of information in some countries about how powerful network analysis can be. Among our customers, the first thing they do in the morning is they check the link analysis of a whole scoring run. One customer I had a conversation with reports that the first thing he does each day is view the networks and the connections between them, to identify important nodes worth investigating, and all other customers which are connected to them.”
IMTF emphasises that entities and transactions might seem unsuspicious until you dig deeper and analyse the relations behind the entities. In addition, just checking one level of entities might not be enough – the network analysis should therefore include multiple levels.
Maud Vonlanthen, head of global marketing and communication at IMTF, notes: “We use a no code or very low code approach, meaning that even a non-developer can use the tool very easily. The interface is made to help adapt the tool to each organisation’s needs really easily without coding experience.”
Potgieter says: “While emerging technologies are designed for ease of use, it is important for compliance officers to know what tools are available and upskill themselves to use them effectively. In AI specifically, the skills required are not coding, but rather prompt engineering. Compliance officers need to ask the right questions. That's why a compliance institute is very important: we keep members up to date and informed, and members can take advantage of the courses we provide or participate in our ‘power hours’ to stay abreast of developments.”
Share