Month: December 2022

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What is Risk Based Approach to AML?

Risk-Based Approach to AML

Money laundering is a severely growing problem, and it’s not limited to any one country. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that money laundering figures worldwide will exceed the global 2% of global GDP ($1.7 trillion).

Eurojust Report on Money Laundering, states that cases registered regarding money laundering have doubled within the last 6 months. 

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) is a set of guidelines pertaining to financial institutions and other related industries. These guidelines are meant to prevent activities that support the financing of terrorism. Regulated businesses should not knowingly or unknowingly support these activities.

Risk-Based AML and Global Regulation

There are several anti-money laundering regulatory bodies that set up rules and regulations that local and international organizations have to follow. For companies to do business in a particular location, they have to comply with the rules and regulations set by the governing body. 

The Financial Action Task Force is the global money laundering and terrorist financing regulatory body. The FATF has the responsibility to set international standards that aim to prevent illegal activities and the harm they cause to society. 

FATF works with several governments and national regulatory bodies to achieve regulatory reforms. Regulations made by FATF cover more than 200 countries and jurisdictions. 

The UK was the first one to propose a risk-based assessment for anti-money laundering. It was further adopted and improved by the FATS in 2012. this led to the development of proactive risk management.

Common AML Risk Factors

A proactive risk-based approach to AML can only be done when there is an accurate risk assessment. And there are 3 distinct areas of risk that regulated industries need to focus on during risk assessment.

  1. Individual Risks

Governments need to collect and maintain lists of high-risk individuals. These lists include known fraudsters, money launderers, terrorists, and red-flagged Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs). 

These individuals are considered high-risk individuals because of their influence and access to a large number of funds. During customer onboarding, businesses need to identify high-risk individuals as it’s a KYC requirement. 

  1. Location Based Risks

Governing bodies also compile assessments of risk that comes with geographical jurisdictions,  flagging unsatisfactory money laundering and terrorist financing. 

The geographical location determines the laws, regulations, technology, security, data privacy, and data accuracy of a business environment. To take a risk-based approach to AML, businesses need to take location-specific risks into consideration. 

  1. Channel Risks

The way a product or service is taken to the market can also affect the risk level. Now that we’re living in an internet-based economy, sales of products and services that happen online always carry a hint of risk. Without robust KYC verification and ID verification process, there’s no way to eliminate the level of risks associated with online transactions.

How to Implement a Risk-Based Approach to AML?

Taking a risk-based approach to AML is similar to managing any other type of risk in your business. A risk-based approach to AML includes:

  1. Identifying Business Risks

To be able to take a proactive approach to AML, you first need to identify the risks. A business needs to review products, services, and portfolios, that contain common AML risk factors, such as:

  • Customers – How much do you know about the type of customers for your service?
  • Geography – What’s the exposure of the target markets to financial crime?
  • Delivery channel – By what means the product will be delivered to the customers?
  • Industry – How advanced are the regulations of your business’s industry?
  • Monetary Value – Does your product and service has a high monetary value?
  • Regulatory Controls – If the regulations in the country are advanced enough.
  • Process Controls – How well can you document and follow your processes as a business?
  1. Analyzing Business Risks

Analyzing and assessing risks that a business has to face is crucial for a risk-based approach to AML. Using a table of risk factors for each product or service, a business can assign risks. Then the level of risk can be categorized as “low, medium, or high”. 

The FATF has a guide that businesses can use to show how to rank risks using a simple matrix.

  1. Implement Policies that Eliminate Risks 

Once the risk assessment is complete, businesses need to make policies and implement policies that help mitigate risks. These policies should make sure that the right level of scrutiny is applied to the right type of risks. 

There should be an ideal balance between high scrutiny for high risks, and minimal friction for customers with low risks.

Technologies Involved in Anti-Money Laundering

To manage risk and maintain the risks of a business, there needs to be a solution that can cover every part of the business. There are a lot of AML technologies out there that can automate the risk-assessment process for new customers, and new transactions within seconds. 

Technologies involved in anti-money laundering can be broken down into two categories:

  1. Know Your Customer

Know Your Customer (KYC) is the combination of customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence that regulated organizations comply with to make sure their customers are real people and not someone posing as someone else. If there’s a customer that poses a level of risk needs, to be monitored throughout the relationship with the business. 

In an economy that’s moving towards digital solutions, new solutions that cater to online ID verification, and ID proofing are always coming up. These technologies can help businesses identify whether a customer is a genuine person or a criminal with stolen ID data.

  1. Transaction Monitoring

The process of monitoring a customer’s transactions, be they small or big is known as transaction monitoring. Transaction monitoring techs are designed to eliminate the risk of money laundering. These techs can monitor digital transactions across all business channels and look for suspicious behavior.

The cost of these solutions to the business is the only consideration businesses need to have before finalizing a technology.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Anti-Money Laundering?

Anti-money laundering is a set of rules and regulations outlining steps a business needs to take to manage or prevent the risks of money laundering. These regulations help businesses fight terrorism financing and other illegal activities. Businesses that work in under-regulated industries need to comply with these rules and regulations.

2. What is a risk-based approach to AML?

AML regulations can be enhanced by taking a risk-based approach. The risk-based approach includes assessing the risk of a product and service’s exposure to the market, customers, channels, transactions, and other risk factors. 

The assessed risk is categorized into low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk categories. The potential impact on the business needs to be analyzed so businesses can come up with policies to prevent and manage these risks.

3. What is Know Your Customer (KYC)?

Know Your Customer or KYC refers to the customer’s due diligence and enhanced due diligence process. Regulated companies have to make their customers go through the diligence process to verify if the customer is an actual individual or not.

The KYC process also includes continuous transaction monitoring, through which businesses can figure out suspicious activities.

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Common Challenges in Risk Management

Challenges in Risk Management

It is almost impossible for lenders to measure and manage credit risk, based on the disruptive patterns in consumer behavior in the last 2 months. How can large banks ensure that their digital transformation programs are working perfectly?

Managing risks is becoming tougher in today’s time, and businesses from all over the globe are implementing new methods.

Managing Risk Models in a Crisis

One of the biggest problems faced by risk leaders worldwide involves changes in consumer risk. Leaders also need to know how to measure these risks to be able to better decisions. 

Every major change in the economy brings up the issue of risk model performance.  The current models are based on risk models prior to Covid.

Robust risk management models will keep performing well even when the situation in the financial industry has changed. But the actual level of risk will change, making the model monitoring and governance more critical.

Biggest Challenges in Risk Management Today

There are 5 major challenges in risk management as of today, including:

1. Failure to Use Appropriate Risk Metrics

Value-at-risk or VaR is a common risk metric, but it only tells the largest loss a firm has incurred at any given time. VaR gives no idea about the distribution of losses that exceed VaR.

This would suggest the application of VaR doesn’t guarantee the success of risk management. The effectiveness of implementing VaR also depends on the liquidity of the financial market.

2. Measurement of Known Risks

Risk managers sometimes mistake accurately depicting the probability and the size of the losses. They could also use the wrong distribution channel. For a financial institution with endless positions, although they may properly estimate the distribution associated with every position.

Unable to measure, or wrongly measure a known risk is a big challenge in risk management.

3. Failure to Take Known Risks into Consideration

Sometimes, risk managers face challenges in considering all the risks in a risk management system. Sometimes it’s because of neglect, and sometimes it’s because of the additional expense. This happens because it’s impossible to forecast future events.

4. Unable to Communicate Risks to Top Management

Risk managers have to share information about the risk position of the organization with the top management. The management and the board have to take this information into account and come up with a risk management strategy.

If a risk manager is unable to provide this information to the top, they won’t be able to come up with a risk management strategy. The strategy they do come up with is based on ill information. This leaves the firm vulnerable and unable to manage risks properly.

5. Failure in Monitoring and Managing Risks

The last challenge for risk managers is to capture all the changes in the risk characteristics of securities to adjust strategies accordingly. As a result, risk managers often fail to monitor or get rid of risks simply because the risk characteristics of security may change too quickly to allow them to assess them, and put on risk-preventing methods accordingly.

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First-Party Fraud, and How To Prevent It?

what is first-party fraud

The word fraud is used almost every day today. It’s not always hackers sitting behind multiple screens who conduct these frauds. Ordinary people with a little bit of knowledge also conduct fraud. In reality, a lot of customers end up sharing their personal information with fraudsters unknowingly. These fraudsters use this information to rack up huge credit card bills. In other cases, users end up committing fraud using their own information.  

Both of these types of fraud are called first-party fraud. 

Most of us assume that first-party fraud happens only in banks, but as telecom companies have entered the financial industry, so they’re also feeling the pinch. Debt collection agencies are leaking more profits and costs, trying to collect something that isn’t recoverable.

First-Party Fraud Affects Profitability

First-party fraud usually comprises 10% of the volume of credit card losses. These losses are also called bad debts. This huge risk often gets missed as it comes somewhere between the risk department, operations, and the fraud team. In other words, first-party fraud does not have an owner most of the time. 

Soiled fraud and collection departments can reduce the chances for fraudulent patterns to be discovered. While the relatively low volume of first-party fraud reduces its priority level, for some organizations, first-party fraud remains one of the biggest profit drains. 

In 2022, it is more vital than ever to take decisive actions and manage first-party fraud.

Why It’s Easy to Miss First-Party Fraud?

Traditional third-party fraud requires some kind of impersonation or stolen identity. Be it stolen credit card data, or someone taking over your identity. At some point, many victims of third-party fraud become aware of the crime when unknown transactions come up on their statements. 

Compared to third-party fraud, first-party fraud is often confused with credit risk problems. Accounts that don’t pay their debts are sent to collections for a progression of treatment. 

Unlike third-party fraud, the transactions happen with accurate information and they look like legit transactions. This makes first-party fraud much harder to spot. And in this way, first-party fraud can be eventually written off as it is uncollectible. This information is also sold to third-party external collection agencies.

Newer financial services providers are even more challenged in figuring out first-party fraud. Newcomers don’t have access to all the historical data that banks have to analyze which transactions are legit and which aren’t.

Be it an online bank, or a telecom service financing costly devices, all these organizations face similar challenges in fraud prevention.

Common Types of First-Party Fraud

There are different types of first-party frauds that organizations should know about:

  1. Sleeper Fraud: It occurs when a fraudster gets their hands on a type of credit, and over time builds up a reputation. As they build trust with the service provider over months, they can take maximum advantage of cash and any goods with these cards. Once they’ve racked up a huge debt, they leave this information and move on to the next one.
  2. Bust-Out Fraud: This type of fraud is also called hit-and-run fraud. It can happen in a type of financial service. It’s quick and sometimes easy, and credit cards and loans are the easiest targets. In some countries where cheques are in use or have slower clearing cycles, fraudsters can exploit these weaknesses to rack up a credit balance 10 times the normal limit. Then the fraudsters cash out before these transactions are even caught.

How Does First Party Fraud happen?

First-party fraud is highly opportunistic and it can be done on a small scale by a single fraudster or by a group of fraudsters. Both sleeper fraud and bust-out fraud can be conducted in an opportunistic fashion. 

Some of the first-party fraud schemes are executed in both ways. For example, in the UK, Europe, and the Middle East, the highly fluid mobility of university students creates conditions that are perfect for fraud. 

In this type of fraud, fraudsters gangs have focused on out-of-country students to buy their ID data and bank account information as these students go back to their home countries. There are many potential victims, as only 10% of foreign students stay in their country. Almost 90% of students go back to their home countries, thus their information is ripe for exploitation. 

Fraud with student credential fraud often starts with criminal gangs advertising in student unions and social media. Sometimes they even infiltrate family WhatsApp groups just to get their hands on some quick cash.

While these offers may be tempting to cash-strapped students, the fraudsters have different intentions. With 1.3 million students in the EU, you can see why this group is one of the biggest targets for fraudsters.

Strategies for Fighting First-Party Fraud

The biggest challenge with first-party fraud is distinguishing between fake and real customers. So, what can businesses do? Here are some strategies to try fighting first-party fraud:

  1. Learn to recognize the distinction between unintentional bad debt and intentional bad debt, or fraud. With the right type of analytics, patterns can start to become clear, and very evident. 
  2. You need to accurately categorize fraud as fraud, instead of calling it a bad debt. These instances should be called first-party fraud or synthetic identity fraud. This will help you to begin identifying patterns and common traits in the schemes fraudsters use. 
  3. Define clear rules and models and perform link analysis to analyze data for known fraud patterns. These common signs include phone numbers, names, email addresses, and other identifiers that fraudsters will use again and again to apply for loans, credit cards, accounts, and mobile subscriptions. 
  4. Improve sign-up and onboarding processes by using these analytics. By doing this, you can monitor for links between declined applications for credit risk and new applications where the same data is used for application. 
  5. If you don’t have enough evidence to mark a transaction as fraudulent, tag these accounts as suspicious accounts. Once an account is opened, and credit is extended, the account can be monitored more carefully for suspicious activity. Any sudden changes in account data can be a sign of fraudulent transactions about to happen.

Be Proactive With First Party Fraud

The rate of fraud is only increasing, so businesses need to be proactive in fraud prevention. For those fraudsters with established synthetic identities hidden in account portfolios, the high time for using these identities is now. 

At the same time, organizations that are keen to increase their customer base have had to increasingly look to digital channels, as face-to-face interactions have almost vanished. Increased criminal activity coupled with increased reliance on remote onboarding processes has made it harder to prevent fraud.

Businesses need to make sure that they act before fraudsters do.