Nedbank has deployed the Searchspace anti-money laundering solution to step up its compliance with the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA) as the country tightens the screws on illegal financial transactions.
Searchspace says its solution monitors more than 450 million accounts a day, working with regional, national and global banks.
"This represents our first anti-money laundering deployment on the African continent," says Jason Kingdon, CEO of Searchspace.
Its software enables organisations to automatically interpret and act upon vast amounts of data. Every transaction is monitored for unusual activity, immediately notifying compliance staff about those that may require further investigation and providing them with an evidential audit to effectively manage the compliance process.
"In order to strengthen our anti-money laundering efforts, we wanted to use the most effective and proven solution available on the global market today - one that could be easily integrated into our existing systems, capable of rapid deployment and built on best practice," says Andre Wentzel, group money laundering control officer at Nedcor.
Wentzel says it is essential for financial services organisations to proactively manage transactions that could represent money laundering behaviour.
Money laundering is estimated to be worth between 2% and 5% of the world`s economy and is regarded as the lifeblood of terrorist financing. The last few years have seen enormous efforts from around the globe to tackle this problem and improve the basis for suspicious activity reporting.
FICA imposed duties on certain institutions to introduce new anti-money laundering measures, including training employees, reporting suspicious transactions to the Financial Intelligence Centre and the retention of client information.
In June 2003, SA was granted membership of the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body that develops and promotes policies to combat money laundering.
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