Banks and Financial institutions are continuously increasing the services that are offered to Customers and are innovating newer channels through which the customers can avail the services. While such innovations are helping the Banks and FIs in widening their business opportunities and also in improving the Customer experience, they are also opening up more and morechallenges with regard to Anti Money Laundering compliance. The Regulatory Banks of each Country is prescribing several checks and balances to detect and prevent AML transactions, which the Banks and FIs have to enforce and comply with. It is quite easily understandable that with the huge volume of transactions Banks and FIs handle, they would require an appropriate technology support to be able to comply with the regulations on AML. There are twodifferent solution options for AML. One option is to implement a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Product exclusively for AML. Such Products provide the capabilities to implement  AML solution but suffer from some limitations that include: not self sufficient system in as much as they require a middleware to transfer data between the Banking systems and the AML systems cannot connect to internal databases to fetch master data /reference data about the customer, their accounts and so on which are necessary for evaluating transactions against the AML Business rules or atleast not so without writing huge bits of custom code which becomes difficult to maintain over a period of time

The other option is to implement a solution using Business Process Management Systems, Business Activity Monitoring Systems and Business Rules Management Systems which together offer the right set of capabilities required to implement AML solutions. But, normally each of these systems areprovided by different vendors and lend challenges in implementing a coherent AML solution due to various technology and functional in compatibilities. Although there are vendors who offer all the three types of systems, yet more often each of these systems are separate products some developed in-house andsome acquired and bundled as a Product suite, almost suffering from the same limitations as implementing products from three different vendors. Naturally, aPlatform that can provide all these capabilities as a single product and still overcome the limitations of a COTS AML Product would be highly welcome. But the question is, is there such a Product / Platform available? Theanswer is, Yes, there is.  MOND Integration Platform provides all the capabilities required to implement AML Solution, more particularly,

the integration capability to connect and exchangetransaction data with Banking systems

the integration capability to connect and fetch master /reference data from Banking databases

the Process flow capability to implement AML validation processes

the Business Rules capability required to implement AMLBusiness rules

the Business Activity Monitoring capability required tocapture and validate the events and intercept the events that evaluate positiveto AML Business Rules and raise appropriate realtime alerts and notificationsto the AML investigators

the capability to extract data, generate reports and submit tothe regulatory authorities in the electronic formats prescribed

I would have been happy if I could show all these capabilities in this blog. But it would make this blog unreadable. Hence, Iwish to showcase some main aspects of implementing an AML solution on the MONDPlatform and the advantages therefrom. It is a good practice to componentise the AML solution so that they become more maintainable and reusable. The snapshot below shows 4 components defined for implementing an AML solution:

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The Process-Outward-Remittance-Map is a process flow component which receives the Banking transaction, submits the data for AML validation and raise alerts and notifications where required

The Validate AML Activities-Real Time is a component which fetches the reference data and the data of the historical events and subjects the data to validation against AML Business Rules. The Process-Outward-Remittance-Map and this component implement a realtime validation of the Banking transactions. This component separates and obfiscates the complexities of data extraction while implementing an AML Solution

The Validate AML Activities-Batch Mode is a component which run at pre-defined intervals, fetches the reference data and the data of the historical events and subjects the data to validation against AML Business Rules

The AML Validation Rules is a container of all the AML Business Rules. As a separate component independent from the AML Validation Process flow, it considers that AML rules have their own life cycle independent of the AML validation Process itself, it  makes the rules reusable and provides capability to the Business users to define and maintain the AML rules.

The componentisation of the AML solution as above itself isa great advantage as far as maintainability of the solution. But that is notthe end. Take a look at the map defined to implement the AML Process flow:

The map is simple to implement and easy to understand providing natural english like mapping definition. Even the AML Rules like Person and Country Watch list andTransaction Threshold rules are easy to define and maintain. Given below is asnapshot of the Person and Country Watch List.

The Transaction Threshold rules can be defined in XLS and uploaded as Decision table as shownin the snapshot below:

To summarize,MOND integration platform provides all the capabilities required to implement acoherent AML solution and brings very distinct advantages such as< div>

Provides absolute control to Banks with Real-time transaction validation

Enables proper Regulatory compliance with Batch validation of transactions

Provides control to Business users to maintain AML rules in natural English

Renders maintenance of Business rules easy with support toExcel based Business rules

Eliminates the need for separate Business Rules productswith seamless integration of Middleware, BAM and Business Rules

No need for Business users to be aware of Object models /Data models unlike other Business Rules Products – Just be aware of industrystandard Business terms

The Platform is available on the Cloud as iPaas and it can also be implemented on-premise for Banks and FIs for whom Cloud is not anoption due to Organizational and external regulations.

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