AMONG - Key Story

Money Laundering (ML) detection has risen to the top of the security agenda in Europe over the past few years. The IMF defines money laundering as "a process in which the illicit source of assets obtained or generated by criminal activity is concealed to obscure the link between the funds and the original criminal activity". The main limitation of current commercially available Anti-Money Laundering (AML) products is that they focus on analysing financial transactions within isolated financial institutions, without addressing the need to collaborate with other AML systems commonly installed at financial institutions. Anti-Money Laundering on Grid (AMONG) enables banks to cooperate with each other and with their customers so as to provide a holistic, automated AML capability, through Grid technology. Grid technology provides the cost-efficient, effective, secure and trustful framework underlying AMONG. AMONG enables more reliable service delivery to a bank’s customers, improving the bank’s reputation within the market. Furthermore, using AMONG potentially provides substantial cost savings; preventing ML-related transactions means banks will avoid the huge fines levied for being complicit in ML (such as those applied to Union Bank of California and American Express).

AMONG aims to:

1. Provide trustful and secure exchange of AML information between financial organisations
2. Improve the success rate in identifying ML activity
3. Enable new business models for AML provisioning
4. Reduce AML compliance cost

AMONG will be available by 2010 and will be launched initially into the Greek market at a price considerably lower than the price of stand-alone AML applications, significantly reducing the cost of AML services that financial institutions must use to comply with the EU regulations on money laundering. AMONG is expected to be widely adopted within the next few years.