West Bromwich Building Society is using anti-money-laundering
software to improve security and meet Financial Services Authority
regulations.
The building society has installed STB-Detector throughout its
50 branches. The software, from STB Systems, checks automatically
for any suspicious activity or transactions in accounts.
The building society previously relied on manual scrutiny of
crude data extracts - for example, recent transactions of over
£10,000 - to protect against fraud and money laundering.
It moved to an automated approach after similar sized businesses
were fined for failing to comply with the FSA's "Know your
customer" rules, said West Bromwich Building Society information
security manager Rob Hine.
STB-Detector compares transactions with a history of individual
account activities and uses this information to highlight unusual
movements on accounts.
Hine said, "The benefit of STB-Detector is it can look back at
the behaviour of a customer. It shows the behaviour change. We have
put four years' of customer transactions into the system, so it has
got enough data."
The automated system produces a manageable number of alerts,
whereas the old system involved checking thousands of transactions
that met basic selection criteria, said Hine.
"The rules within the STB system are user-configurable and we
could improve how we manage referrals to the National Criminal
Intelligence Service," he added.
"We could load into the system our historic database of
referrals - a Microsoft Access database with 100Mbytes of data -
and have an improved case management and audit trail."
User configuration allows the building society to define the
sort of behaviour the system will highlight, whether that is
transactions over £50,000, cash transactions or transactions that
are five times higher than usual for a customer, said Hine.
"We have also got the system linked to our intranet, improving
the process of staff making manual referrals," he added.