Standard Chartered Bank is rolling out integrated fraud
detection and compliance software to standardise risk management
across its global operations. The move will also enable savings
through economies of scale.
The bank is adopting a range of anti-fraud modules from Norkom
Technologies covering operational risk management, anti-money
laundering, fraud detection and prevention, and watch list
management.
Implementation has already begun in the US and UK, where the
software is expected to be fully deployed in early 2006. A global
roll-out across all 50 countries in which the bank operates is set
to be completed during 2007.
Until now, the bank has not had a dedicated global anti-fraud
system, but has developed a variety of local systems internally to
track potentially fraudulent activity. The Norkom package should
enable the bank to adopt consistent international processes which
can then be fine-tuned to meet the specific regulatory environments
of each country.
The software will also help to join up anti-fraud processes with
regulatory compliance procedures at the bank.
Michael McVicker, head of compliance for the bank's Americas
operations, said that increasingly regulators want to see
anti-money laundering systems from which the output is either a
decision to seize funds or a report on suspicious activity that can
be passed to regulators.
Norkom's technology monitors banking transactions for suspicious
activity both in real time and batch mode. Real-time sanctions
filtering is more limited than batch analysis but reflects the need
to stop fraudulent transaction activity as soon as possible. Both
real-time and batch analysis generate prioritised alerts for the
bank's analyst team for further investigation.
The software also monitors transactions against various watch
lists established by international banking and regulatory
authorities to identify transactions to or from individuals,
organisations or countries that are considered high-risk.
The system integrates with the Swift messaging and payment
processing system used by the banking community. It can also
analyse data from all of Standard Chartered's customer relationship
management, transaction and payments systems, many of which run on
open source software.
Norkom's modules are database-independent, taking feeds from the
bank's various systems into a datawarehouse for analysis. McVicker
said integration was expected to be relatively straightforward,
since it has become much easier to export data to standard
interfaces.