You need to ask 50 people an urgent question. But instead of sending out an immediate, cost-effective email to all, you employ extra staff to write individual letters, dispatch each letter separately, and wait patiently for the all-important replies.
If your company is still manually monitoring transactions, you’re sending letters, not emails. You’re utilising costly human resources in an inefficient process that will fail you to give you the information you need within the time-frame you require.
Granted, this simplified analogy doesn’t take into account the breadth of features offered by a state-of-the-art Automated Transaction Monitoring solution. But as automated compliance processes become the way of the future, relying on increasing numbers of staff to manually process crucial information is impractical, to say the least.
The Financial Action Task Force has recently issued advisory guidance on the subject: Automated Transaction Monitoring, they state, is no longer an asset to AML procedures. It’s a practical necessity. Automated monitoring of your clients’ transactions is, quite simply, the only way to stay current.
It’s also the only way your company can cope with ever-changing rules and regulations. With an automated solution in place, any business is able to:
- Monitor an ever-increasing numbers of digital transactions
- Manage more complex transactions
- Detect suspicious activities and persons
- Identify financial crime almost before it occurs
- Remain in line with financial directives, rules and regulations
Strangely, there’s still an unfounded resistance to Automated Transaction Monitoring, with even the giants of the financial world falling foul of the system due to an insistence on archaic, manual processes.
In 2021, Deutsche Bank suffered sanctions and admonitions (including a warning from the Federal Reserve that its compliance processes were failing miserably) for its inability to handle its transactional load. The lender’s human compliance officers were simply unable to cope with the volume of data, resulting in a high rate of false positives – the curse of compliance departments…
Humans miss things. They tire quickly. And they lack the ability to streamline the huge amounts of data involved in multiple, complex transactions; to appropriately flag alerts; and to create a holistic understanding of entire entities.
Had it emplaced an effective, organisation-wide system (such as iSPIRAL’s AML Transaction Monitoring solution, a unified platform that comes with tailored rules, bespoke algorithms, and flexible deployment systems) Deutsche would not have suffered its consequent loss of earnings and reputation – both factors that have a debilitating effect on any company, whatever its size.
As the regulatory environment becomes increasingly challenging (more digital transactions, more complex data, more money laundering, and more individualised restrictions from region to region around the globe), ensuring your business not only survives, but thrives, is a task that requires Automated Transaction Monitoring.
Still not convinced that automated triumphs over manual? Scrap your next 10 emails and hand-write letters instead. We’ll wait. Request your demo now!
