Actimize, a leading provider of transactional risk management software for the financial services industry and a NICE Systems company (NASDAQ:NICE), today announced that Renaissance Capital, a major emerging markets investment bank, has fully implemented its Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and market abuse solutions to comply with strict FSA and Russian regulations and to automate, streamline and drive down the costs of its enterprise compliance enforcement, gaining lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO).
"Before, we used a number of manual checks and processes to monitor transactions, but these methods were too complicated, time consuming and simply weren't sufficient for our auditors. After conducting due diligence on ten vendors, we chose Actimize, since it provides the best overall solutions for our requirements," explained Alexey Klepikov, Project Manager at Renaissance Capital. "Our business processes and trading schemes are different from those of typical banks and can present challenges when tracking suspicious activities. However, as a result of Actimize experience with dozens of other institutions, we managed to test the solution on site in a week, early in the selection process, which ended with us benefiting from a fully-functioning Actimize solution within five business days."
Renaissance Capital, founded in 1995 as a Moscow-based investment bank, delivers innovative financial and investment solutions to government, corporate and institutional clients in high-opportunity emerging markets around the world. It has expanded significantly to become the pre-eminent specialist in emerging markets, with a presence in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Russia and the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States). The firm also offers its clients access to these markets through financial centres such as London and New York.
"Working on a single risk platform makes it easy for our compliance staff to track and monitor alerts. If there is a compliance issue we definitely know about it," added Klepikov. "We needed to implement a rigorous Market Abuse solution to keep us in compliance with the newly introduced Russian requirements. Actimize's single platform makes this relatively simple to deploy and provides us with the insight and knowledge that we require."
Actimize's solutions enable compliance and risk managers to manage a complete surveillance program on a single platform. The AML solution addresses requirements such as those defined in the Third Money-Laundering Directive, from account opening, watch list filtering and activity monitoring, to case management, oversight and reporting. The Market Abuse solution monitors and detects dozens of different issues from potential market manipulation and insider dealings to other market abuse issues, and automatically generates alerts. The system uses several analytical methods to assign priority scores to alerts, thus improving the efficiency of regulators, trading managers and compliance staff. Built on a single, integrated platform, the Actimize solution enables institutions to add additional different compliance and fraud solutions over time, while retaining the same analytical tools, data layer, investigation and case management interface, dashboard, audit tracking and other functions.
"We are extremely happy that Renaissance Capital is successfully leveraging our solutions and platform to not only adhere to compliance demands, but also stay one step ahead of its competitors," said Bruno Piers de Raveschoot, Vice President and Head of Actimize Europe. "With our AML and market abuse solutions, Renaissance Capital can identify suspicious behaviour more effectively, streamline its processes and enhance efficiency as well as protect itself against the repercussions of reputational and financial losses that may be incurred from different compliance issues."