One of the first in Europe to adopt technology to automate its anti-money laundering (AML) activities, KBC will use the same technology in its fight against fraud. In doing so it is signalling a new trend that's fast gaining ground as companies recognise the economic synergies to be gained by combining their compliance management and financial crime prevention activities.

KBC Bank, one of Belgium's top three banks with operations throughout Europe, implemented Norkom's AML solution in 2002 to improve compliance management. Having benefited from more accurate and efficient detection and investigation, KBC Bank has now deployed Norkom's software across all of its European operations.

Using Norkom the bank has streamlined its detection capabilities improved the efficiency of detection by around 300%. This increased accuracy has also enabled KBC to maintain its Moody's AA3 risk rating and sustain the confidence of its customers, shareholders and the regulator.

In addition KBC are able handle the total volume of alerts and investigations coming from approximately 400,000 transactions daily using a core team of four investigators. Without Norkom KBC estimates that a team of at least 20 people would be required.

Determined to stay one step ahead, KBC will now use Norkom to fight fraud, a natural progression in the eyes of Bruno Van den Meerschaut, KBC's Head of Anti-Money Laundering, who explains, "the fundamental challenge, both in compliance and financial crime prevention, is to bring transactional, customer and account data together and, through analytics, to identify the suspicious or unusual'," says Bruno. "The rest is simply fine tuning for specific purposes, whether that's money laundering, internal fraud or other types of financial crime."