Money laundering is a suspicious activity that finance institutes and companies use to access money compliance through negative means called black money. Anti-money laundering is a white hat hacker service for these illegal activities. A service that companies use to trigger any black hat activity performed in their financial department.
HSBC popular as the biggest bank in the whole of Europe paid around a total of $1.9 billion fine for a failure not to avoid money laundering activities. Also, as per the investigation team, this happened due to poor management and not keeping the anti-laundering services active.
The global size of anti money laundering services will see a rise of $1770.2 million by 2023 a huge growth seeing the past trends. Read on to learn more about the history of AML, why it is so important and how this service can help you prevent illegal activities at financial companies and institutes. Also, keep the country’s money safe for better economic activities.
Anti-Money Laundering History
In 1970 the United States was the first company to intact with anti-money laundering legislation when it established the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) The first country to intact with anti-money laundering legislation was the US United States. An earlier practice to avoid money laundering and illegal activities in the company was strengthened by the approval of more laws. It was formed to protect the financial systems from crime and make financial systems stronger in the country.
Later on, in 1989 more countries showed up interest and created a global AML system called FATF Financial Action Task Force. The mission was to promote international standards and to prevent black money activities at a global level. After some time was spent on the attack of 9/11, the United States started its AML service to combat terrorist finance activities.
Another important organization to be considered IMF is the International Monetary Fund with 189 members from different countries. The core purpose was to make sure sustainability and follow international laws
List of 5 Bigger Markets Where AML Security is being used;
- Insurance Companies
- Retail Services
- Capital Markets
- Public Sectors
AML Compliance in Financial Institutes
Financial institutes like banks and redirected to high standards regarding the follow on anti-money laundering procedures and ensuring the systems are working fine and safe from fraudulent activities.
In every financial institute/ company, the employees are being trained on the behalf of some degree to trigger and measure any suspicious customer activities in the system. Bigger size companies have a separate department for this.
AML Screening Controls
Many governmental, finance companies and businesses set SOPs to prevent money laundering activities. The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime has given the guide and steps that help a government prospect a person involved in money laundering schemes.
Records Filtration and Management
Finance-related companies keep a detailed record of their customer and transactions with the track of the AML System activities that could help them flag bad clients/ customers coming in. This data could be divided into multiple arrays depending on the transactions being done (including the denied ones as well).
For companies like banks, AML Compliance starts with the verification of new customers, through a technique called KYC (Know Your Customer). To understand the client identify the banks, need to understand the consumer behavior and verify that the deposited funds are coming from a verified source or some illegal one.
This process of identification also requires financial companies to complete the screening process of the new customers coming in that they don’t have some criminal background or a politically exposed person.
Customer due diligence an integral to the identity verification KYC process verifying the information that the customer is sharing is accurate and verified. This is a continuous process extending to consumers’ past and future transactions.
Technologies being used to identify money laundering and suspicious activities continue to upgrade over time and become more authoritative. Machine Learning and Artificial Technologies could give a boost to upgrading these technologies.
How Does AML Verification Work?
To understand the model of the functioning and how it works we need to see some case studies about it. So here let’s take an example of how businesses use AML to avoid black money functions in a company.
When a new user signs the company takes all the legal records as a piece of security information to keep a record about you then they compare that data with the previous criminal and politically exposed data so they verify that the new consumer coming in is the verified one.
As discussed before in banking cases the company keeps the information for further transactions by the client and customer. The same case goes for the businesses as well they keep a record of the activities performed within the company to make sure any employee or member of the company is performing any suspicious activity.