Investment bank ABN Amro is using technology it
developed last year for ensuring regulatory compliance to help it
conduct a broad-based risk reassessment of its global client
base.
The bank is using the web-based development tool to automate
processes and improve its workflows for reviewing existing clients.
This should provide a better understanding of the risks it is
exposed to by particular client segments, said ABN Amro.
The review is particularly pressing as last December the bank
was handed a £45m fine for “deficiencies” in its US-dollar clearing
activities at its New York office, as well as violations of US
regulations about managing foreign assets at its Dubai branch.
The payout followed an independent investigation that uncovered
how, between 1997 and 2004, there were instances of employees
circumventing internal processes to make US-dollar payments from
and to countries such as Iran and Libya. The countries were on a
list of “sanctioned” states maintained by the US Office of Foreign
Assets Control.
The bank expects to have completed the risk-reassessment project
before the end of the year, potentially opening the way to broader
applications of its user-view technology, which it developed in
partnership with Edge IPK.
Last year, the bank told Computer Weekly how it planned to use
Edge IPK’s Edgeconnect application for business relationship
monitoring and filtering. It initially trialled the technology to
enable its ABN Amro Trust unit to respond more easily to global
compliance requirements on monitoring for international money
laundering activities.
Tony De Bree, a project manager at ABN Amro who is developing
new ways to use the tool, said the potential of the system’s
flexible front-end presentation layer to replace traditional
customer relationship management systems was yet to be fully
exploited. However, the success of the project could open the way
to more ambitious deployments.
In particular, he said the application could have a role to play
in meeting the demands of forthcoming legislation such as Europe’s
Markets in Financial Instruments Directive.
“The solution we developed last year with Edge is very broad in
its scope and could potentially help the bank’s staff work in
different ways,” said De Bree.
“But first we need to get people to see a world beyond the
traditional CRM systems, and that takes time because it goes
against the grain of the IT industry, which continues to push these
large and complex systems.”