Frankfurt/Immenstaad (Germany), August 01 2022 – As banks and insurance companies grapple with soaring financial crime, mandatory controls and transactions, compliance requirements are also intensifying. In response, they need an infrastructure that reaps all the benefits digitalisation can offer to monitor and combat money laundering, KYC, detect insider dealing and reconcile sanctions lists. And only high-tech solutions can keep pace with the growing complexity of finance and insurance sectors. Accordingly, the key focus of ACTICO RegTech Day 2022 was on digital transformation through AI and machine learning.
“How can financial institutions and insurance companies leverage compliance software, business rules and machine learning to cope with the ever-growing number and complexity of financial transactions? How can a compliance department ensure fewer false-positive hits?” It’s questions like these that are now top of mind for IT and compliance experts from financial institutions and insurance companies. The ACTICO RegTechDay on July 7, 2022 in the Audimax of the Frankfurt School gave them an unrivalled chance to share insights and network.
Compliance 2022: Where high-tech and a social mission combine
ACTICO GmbH organizes the RegTech Day to promote exchange between compliance professionals. It’s also a springboard for ideas to refine the ACTICO Compliance Suite even further. ACTICO boss and compliance solutions head, Thomas Knöpfler, sums it up like this: “One of the reasons why our software’s been so successful is having such close-knit relationships with our customers – which events like this one reflect.” And for good measure: “We get priceless practical insights when meeting face to face, which we can then tap into and keep improving the ACTICO Compliance Suite.”
During day-to-day business, it is all too easy to let the crucial social aspects of compliance go under the radar. But in the worst case scenario, this approach could mean suspect financial transactions concealing human rights violations. So uncovering any such illegality is not just important for the financial institutions concerned – it’s crucial. As Daniel Thelesklaf underlined while presenting, companies need to own the process and meet public expectations. Heading the ‘Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking’ project at the United Nations University in New York, he knows all about how finance can be weaponised in the fight against human trafficking and forced labour. He has advocated commitment commensurate with this responsibility when it comes to following up on payment anomalies. After all, ultimately, following the trail of money is the best way to uncover slavery and human trafficking and end the misery of those affected.
Detect financial crime with ACTICO Compliance Suite
Many RegTech Day visitors who have already used ACTICO’s best-in-class Compliance Suite solution for some time are keen to see which upcoming new features will make their lives even easier. Enter Thomas Ohlemacher, ACTICO Product Manager. He showed onlookers how the revamped user interface and new machine learning features could reduce workload still further. “If your software ever falls short while at work, just get in touch with me.” ACTICO channels frontline feedback like this directly into software development, to help further refine the end solution.
Insider-dealing protection: ACTICO software can save banks almost four minutes per case
Whenever a bank employee trades in shares, documented details have to be sent to their employer to keep everything above board. Leveraging these insights to profit on stocks would constitute insider trading and is prohibited. And that’s why the details in question – so-called ‘duplicates’ – are recorded at the employer’s bank. Despite a process that was all manual to date, rocketing volumes from the stock boom of the past two years have rendered this infeasible. In a nutshell, all roads, including at ACTICO, now lead to digital. That’s why the company now saves its customers almost four minutes per case by allowing duplicates to be digitally recorded. Jörg Degner, a Senior Manager at ACTICO, co-programmed this feature and it was his presentation on “Compliance against insider trading and market manipulation” that really got the crowd going. The key takeaway? Bringing home to those watching the vast amount of time that duplicate recording used to take.
Best practices from satisfied ACTICO customers: A tangible turn-up in efficiency thanks to machine learning
Swiss PostFinance saw the total of incoming transactions to be audited since 2018 rise by an average 7 percent, which meant more and more anomalies and compliance work, especially processing false positives. Here, Andreas Hubacher and Manuel Paris from PostFinance showed how ACTICO’s machine learning could be applied to combat money laundering and eliminate much of the workload.
Regulatory innovations are set to continue growing, although regulation of new technologies remains pending. When asked how crypto will evolve, Oliver Bussmann, the Bussmann Advisory AG founder, thinks crypto markets and traditional markets will amalgamate into a single regulated market for digital assets. “This will see exchanges either developing their own crypto trading venues or entering into partnerships“, he concludes.
Dr Michael Sendker, project manager at Hamburg Commercial Bank (HCOB), also praised ACTICO as a compliance game changer during his presentation. A comprehensive digitalisation project saw the bank’s formerly fragmented IT landscape transformed with an all-inclusive ACTICO solution. The ACTICO Compliance Suite now unites monitoring and reporting functions that were previously distributed across six subsystems. Dr Sendker’s delighted verdict: “The ACTICO system has turbo-charged and streamlined our daily work.”
ACTICO solutions are also very much the first-choice for BayernLB and with good reason. Petra Lauber and Thomas Hanke, project managers at the company, shared practical insights on the topic of ‘Market Abuse and Insider Trading Detection (MAID)’, setting out how and why they replaced their previous solution for monitoring securities trading.
Unsurprisingly, compliance professionals support each other beyond company boundaries. After all, in terms of the regulatory constraints, they’re all in the same boat. And ACTICO gives the compliance community networking opportunities all year round. With RegTech Day, round tables, webinars and other events, those in the sector can exchange views on regulatory updates, solution approaches and software products and feel inspired in their daily work.
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