In our latest podcast, we look at the "2022 Thomson Reuters Anti-Money Laundering Insights Survey", and see how the financial services industry is responding to new threats.
Financial institutions, large and small, continue to grapple with important requirements related to regulatory requirements, such as know your customer processes (KYC) and customer due diligence requirements (CDD). In the banking world, it is imperative you know who your customer is, so you aren’t conducting business with or facilitating the activities of financial criminals, terrorist organizations, or other bad actors.
In our latest podcast, available on the Thomson Reuters Institute Market Insights channel, Gina Jurva, attorney and manager of market insights and thought leadership content for corporate and government at the Thomson Reuters Institute, speaks with Amanda Dupont, an attorney and public records specialist at Thomson Reuters. Dupont has more than 22 years’ experience in this area, and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist.
You can listen to the full podcast here
The podcast details a recent report, the 2022 Thomson Reuters Anti-Money Laundering Insights Survey, and Jurva and Dupont, one of the contributors to the report, discuss challenges posed by digital identity verification and other anti-money laundering (AML) processes. Respondents to the survey, who were key decision-makers from the financial services industry, said they use four new digital identity verification methodologies:
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- ID capture services (with 22% of respondents saying they use this method);
- Digital footprint validation (21%);
- Biometric authentication (15%); and
- Optical character recognition (8%).
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The podcast further examines why the new methods are strong indicators of a shift in the financial services industry toward digital tools and methodologies. This shift is happening in part because these firms need tools that accommodate both the necessities and the opportunities that accompany the move to digital.
The four new digital identity verification methodologies serve as just one example of the range of opportunities that a digital approach provides: new methodologies for uncovering attempted fraud.
In the podcast, Dupont and Jurva also discuss how important the quality of data is in the fight against financial crime. Data drives decisions, and the quality of an organization’s decision-making processes is inextricably linked to the quality of its data. This year, survey respondents were asked how satisfied and confident they were with the accuracy of data acquired from their primary data providers. The answer was, unfortunately, “not very.”
The pair also talk about the importance of anti-financial crime work in general, and the innovative space in which financial institutions currently find themselves. As Dupont says, this is an industry where the ultimate white hats are trying to stop criminal activity in the financial market. Those who work in anti-fraud roles are believers in this noble cause, and everybody should be proud of their efforts, she adds.
Unfortunately, bad actors are continuing to move fast with the times, and they know how to use technology to scale their criminal endeavors. To keep up with the important task of solving financial crime, the industry needs a transparent system and quality data.
