Nedbank Ltd, one of South Africa's largest and premier financial service organisations, has successfully deployed the market leading Searchspace Anti Money Laundering Solution.
It has been implemented in partnership with IBM South Africa. Nedbank is the first bank in Southern Africa to implement this globally recognised intelligent transaction monitoring system, which is used by over 50% of the world's 25 largest banks.
All South African financial institutions are under pressure to meet South African regulatory requirements regarding Money Laundering detection and reporting as a result of FICA (The Financial Intelligence Centre Act, 38 of 2001), with specific reference to the monitoring requirements imposed by the recent FICA Guidance Notes. Failure to implement a solution and monitor account activity in order to report on possible suspicious transactions could result in heavy penalties from the Regulator, in addition to the potential reputational risk involved. To meet this challenge, Nedbank, in collaboration with IBM and Searchspace, has implemented an end-to-end anti money laundering detection system to automate the identification, monitoring and reporting on possible transactional money laundering activities. The system also includes the capability to integrate manually reported cases of possible money laundering.
"In order to strengthen our anti-money laundering efforts we have deployed the most effective and proven AML solution, built on best practice available on the global market today. We have been able to rapidly integrate the Searchspace AML Sentinel into our existing systems without any issues," said Andre Wentzel, Group Money Laundering Control Officer at Nedbank.
The system will monitor every transaction on Private Individual and Business accounts in Nedbank. Searchspace's patented technology allows the system to automatically interpret and act upon vast amounts of transactions as they are processed through the system. Unusual activity is immediately alerted to the analysts in Nedbank's Group Regulatory Risk Services for further investigation. The system is capable of detecting both known and previously unknown patterns of money laundering behavior while minimizing costs through the reduction of false positives.
"Working closely with IBM and Searchspace we have been able to implement the system on time and within budget," said Programme Executive Patricia Maqetuka at Nedbank.
"As Searchspace's premier global partner in the implementation of anti money laundering solutions, IBM South Africa is excited to have jointly implemented the first solution in the country. Our global relationships allowed us to combine the best practice solution with local market tailoring to ensure that it delivered against the Bank's requirements," said Michael Spiteri, Financial Services Sector Lead, IBM Business Consulting Services, South Africa.
"The success of the Nedbank implementation is a testament to the excellent team work and collaboration between the bank's project team, IBM, our implementation partner in South Africa, and Searchspace. Nedbank are fully committed to ensuring that they are using the very best tools available to fight financial crime," said Jason Kingdon, CEO, Searchspace.