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Anti-money laundering in Grid (AMONG) in a few words...

AMONG will create a system to allow banking organizations to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. The system will use grid technologies to enable secure and managed communication between banks and will support each organization’s AML activities, while assisting in meeting new regulatory obligations.

Case Study

Download the AMONG – Anti Money Laundering in Grid (BE19) - case study

Situation

The systems that are currently installed in financial institutions offer only intra-bank automated AML analysis with inter-organisational communication being initiated only in case of anomaly detection. This way the monitoring process is being restricted to simple fraud detection only, whereas the detection of complex illegal financial activities still remains an extremely time-consuming and costly process. This factor adds to the rigidness of contemporary AML applications, since it restrains crime detection into one-sided control, without including the knowledge value that could be produced by the collaboration with other institutions’ systems. AMONG aims at detecting money laundering activity, even when potential criminals attempt to diffuse dirty money through different accounts and financial channels, which are presumed to be un-related.

Objectives

Within the context of AMONG the main objectives include:

Trustful and secure exchange of AML information between financial organisations
Improvement of success rate in identifying ML activity
Enabling of new business models for AML provisioning
Cost reduction of AML service provisioning

At present, banks are only able to perform AML analysis independently on their own data, and only when anomalies are found can they initiate contact with other organisations to establish if the transactions are indeed fraudulent. Simple frauds can be detected this way, but complex illegal financing activities cannot be detected rapidly and cost-effectively when only local AML analysis is automated. The Grid infrastructure allows banks to cooperate with each other and with their customers to provide a holistic, automated AML capability.

Solution

By using Grid services, it is possible to allow financial institutions to extend and correlate their analysis methods using information from other institutions and also from their own business partners and customers. The following specific technical innovations will be demonstrated in the proposed business experiment:

Dynamic Grid security mechanisms will provide a consistent framework for creating trusted networks that may span national boundaries, and allow a bank to provide secure access to AML information;
Dynamic Grid service level agreements will allow the bank to define the level of access they can support, and implement service management methods to respond rapidly to requests without their resources becoming over-extended;
Interoperable Web Service specifications will allow seamless data exchange, facilitating the tracing of suspicious transactions and the correlation of data from different sources.

The resulting capabilities will allow enhanced due diligence based on a secure exchange of information between the bank and other institutions.

Business Impact

The consortium aims at taking advantage of the Grid as an infrastructure, which will support the analysis of transactions not only within a single bank but between organisations as well, thus bringing AML technologies closer to meeting new regulatory obligations.
Grids will support the provision of AML services in a cost-efficient, effective, secure and trustful way.
This will enable more reliable service delivery to the bank customer, improving the bank’s reputation and eventually its market share. Furthermore, the cost of AML services that must be applied to the financial institutions in compliance with the recent EU regulations is expected to be significantly reduced.
Preventing ML related transactions will alleviate the banks from huge fines and related costs.