No more stand-alone solutions: For more efficiency, HCOB decided on a dedicated digitization project to harmonize and modernize its IT compliance systems.
Hamburg Commercial Bank (HCOB) is a private commercial bank and specialist financier headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. It focuses on financing projects in real estate, shipping, infrastructure and energy supply sectors.
HCOB had heterogeneous IT infrastructure, which made its compliance processes excessively time-consuming and resource-hungry. This explains why the bank decided on a dedicated digitization project to harmonize and modernize its IT compliance systems.
As Hamburg Commercial Bank, formerly HSH Nordbank, shifted from a state to a private bank in 2019, it also underwent a comprehensive digital transformation. Its compliance needs evolved over time and a complex IT landscape with numerous differing software solutions emerged, covering embargo/sanctions screening, customer monitoring and scoring, post-transaction monitoring, and capital market protection and conflict of interest management among others. And since these software solutions came from various providers, each with their own data model, managing the interface involved a great deal of communication and coordination.
As part of this transformation, the Hamburg-based bank sought a comprehensive software platform capable of centrally handling existing and future compliance needs holistically, via a single provider. Another priority was to minimize the degree of customizing – the greater the level of standardization, the more scalable the IT solution would be going forward.
“We kept to the standard as far as possible to get a solution up and running faster”, says Dr. Michael Sendker, Head of the Compliance Digitization Project at HCOB.
HCOB chose the ACTICO Compliance Suite partly because of the numerous best practices from the financial sector. “As only one of two providers, ACTICO covers all the functions we need in an all-inclusive software solution,” Dr. Michael Sendker recalls. “Coordinating a single provider, rather the six we used to have, makes for much easier communication and fewer errors.”
Any general system overhaul presents a stiff challenge – but the ACTICO system was successfully implemented, on time and on budget. The benefits reaped by HCOB include far smoother and powerful transaction monitoring and scope to define risk criteria in much finer detail. Also streamlined were customer risk scoring and compliance reporting procedures, with all relevant data now swiftly accessible and integrable in a data warehouse.
“What we now have in place is a database fit for purpose to train the AI on pattern recognition,” Dr. Michael Sendker concludes. HCOB is counting on even further gains in efficiency when machine learning modules are rolled out elsewhere.
"Right out of the box, the numerous configuration parameters included in ACTICO allow us to implement new requirements faster, eliminating the need for extensive customization. "
Dr Michael Sendker, Head of the Compliance Digitization Project at Hamburg Commercial Bank
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