In a report published in June 2007, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) made an evaluation of Greece's Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Anti-Terrorist Financing (ATF) actions. The FATF highlighted the fact that Greece does not meet the standards of an efficient and compliant AML/ATF fight. The Bank of Greece has therefore introduced new measures targeted to Financial Institutions and has issued more comprehensive requirements. In order to comply with these new requirements, ASPIS BANK opted for Sword FircoSoft's Firco Filtering Suite, for the filtering of both its SWIFT transactions and customer database.

Firco Filtering Suite helps ASPIS BANK to eradicate the risk of processing illegal SWIFT transactions and doing business or starting a business relationship with high-risk individuals and counterparties. Sword FircoSoft's solution met perfectly ASPIS BANK's need for a solution capable of filtering data in Greek alphabet against data in Latin. Plugged into SWIFTAlliance Access through the ADK plug-in, Firco Continuity allows ASPIS BANK to filter in real-time an average of 200 SWIFT Payments messages per day against official European Union and OFAC lists. Firco Trust helps ASPIS Bank enhance their Customer Due Diligence policy, by filtering customer and counterparty information and detects risky financial customers and counterparties.

"We are glad to welcome ASPIS BANK as a new customer. Our smooth collaboration contributed in a quick deployment of the solution and ASPIS BANK was able to start filtering its customer database in 10 days", says Laurent Corbel, Sales Director, Sword FircoSoft.

"Professionalism and effectiveness are the characteristics of our implementation experience with Sword FircoSoft. Their highly intelligent and user-friendly software is our new shield against financing of terrorism", adds Dimitrios Margetis, Compliance Officer, ASPIS BANK and member of the implementation team.