Standard Chartered is to introduce financial crime and compliance software from Norkom Technologies as part of a global programme to enhance regulatory compliance and money laundering risk management. Norkom’s anti-money laundering and watch list management solutions are to be installed across the bank’s operations in more than 50 countries to provide transaction monitoring and real time sanctions filtering. Norkom says its applications will help Standard Chartered to detect, analyse, intercept and report suspicious and criminal activity.
“As an international bank, we need systems and procedures that support our high standards so that we only do business with reputable individuals and entities,” says Andrew Hunter, Group Head, Compliance and Regulatory Risk at Standard Chartered. “Failure to do so poses a risk to our business and reputation and also to the communities in which we operate. We have an extensive on-the-ground presence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Our local presence allows us a strong understanding of the markets and clients with whom we do business. As our businesses grow in size and scale, Norkom’s solutions will allow us to maintain a world class compliance operation, based on consistent global processes which can be fine tuned to meet the specific regulatory demands of each country in which we operate.”
The Norkom solution will monitor banking transactions, both in real time and batch mode, to identify suspicious behaviour. Alerts, prioritised in terms of importance and fully populated with all necessary information, will then be issued to Standard Chartered’s analyst teams for investigation.
The Norkom solution will also monitor the bank’s transactions against various ‘watch lists’ that have been established, both by the bank and by the regulatory authorities in each country. It will immediately identify transactions to or from individuals, organisations or countries that are viewed as ‘high risk’, prioritising investigations so that the bank can focus its attention first on those that represent the greatest risk.
“It is the flexibility and functionality of the product that attracted us,” says Hunter. “it’s a single solution that allows us to manage our risk globally, yet can be configured for specific in-country requirements, and allows us to achieve economies of scale, streamline our compliance procedures and help protect our business across the globe.”
Paul Kerley, CEO of Norkom’s Technologies, says he believes that Standard Chartered’s decision to deploy Norkom reflects a growing recognition of the synergies that exist between crime prevention and regulatory compliance. “Standard Chartered will use the Norkom solution to protect its world class reputation and to meet its regulatory commitments – all under a single infrastructure. Our solution’s ability to reduce the incidence of crime by up to 70% and to reduce the operational cost of investigations by up to 300% has already been proven in other implementations; we look forward to delivering the same benefits to Standard Chartered Bank,” he says.