Supporting the battle against money laundering
The project
At the beginning of 2020, BMW Bank launched a pioneering project in the area of money laundering prevention together with PROXORA.
The goal was always clearly defined: to develop a scalable IT solution to check transactions for money laundering-related anomalies on a risk basis. These include, for example, incoming payments from persons on sanctions lists or incoming payments from abroad that do not match contracts or accounts. Everything is subordinated to the goal of fully complying with the legal provisions of the German Banking Act (KWG) and the Money Laundering Act (GwG) applicable to universal banks, even with the new IT solution.
Challenge: Data
An initial challenge was to make the extensive data of BMW Bank accessible, analyze it, aggregate it, and finally process it in compliance with all legal data protection regulations. This required a careful handling of raw data as well as an efficient evaluation of the results to ensure useful processing. Big data strategies implemented by PROXORA helped to cope with the huge volumes of data generated every day.
Solution
For this purpose, PROXORA expanded its existing customer screening module to include comprehensive, automated transaction monitoring with flexibly adaptable verification rules and intelligent pattern recognition of customer activities.
A complex risk calculation with consideration of, among other things, authorized account holders and beneficial owners of corporate customers – supplemented by the legally prescribed risk inheritance – supports thereby the identification of potential risk customers.
In addition to the automated processing of transactional data, the implementation of an interface for reporting potential cases of money laundering to the Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations (FIU) was also a part of the implementation.
Implementation
The project was handled in an agile way from the start – with common two-week sprints and a shared ticket system of the involved teams.
This close collaboration created a solid understanding of the solution to be created, so that the goal of a customized tool was achieved iteratively and incrementally.
It was very helpful having test runs of the rule sets with live data so that the quality of the processed data and the configured test rules could be continuously reviewed and improved.
Result
The PROXORA platform hosted at the BMW Group with the new COIN module (“Compliance Integrity Check”) was launched at the end of 2023 and is in use in the markets connected to BMW Bank.
Overall, the close coordination – combined with a high level of shared understanding of the solution – led to a very positive project outcome. This tried-and-tested approach helped to successfully and sustainably achieve the goal of effectively identifying and combating money laundering.
PROXORA COIN module for efficient anti-money laundering
Mastering compliance challenges with our solutions
Interested? Convince yourself of our solution in a demo!
Request your free and comprehensive information material now.