The head of risk business at Thomson Reuters South Asia has written an article focused on how digitisation and the automation of compliance checks will play a significant role in the fight against trade-based money laundering (TBML).

Thomson Reuter’s World-Check products provide solutions to help meet due diligence obligations, including know-your-customer anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism legislation checks.

Due diligence requirements

Anurag Jain maintains that while banks are digitising their trade finance operations, they must also ensure that due diligence checks and balances are also automated to meet regulations.

Focusing on India, he says that most banks there are currently running manual checks for due diligence of counterparties, vessel tracking, dual use goods, invoice frauds and other related areas, which he says leaves them vulnerable to oversight and errors.

Jain also talks of the rise in trade-based financial crime and how digitisation and the automation of compliance checks will play a significant role in the fight against TBML by replacing subjective manual compliance with a consistent and scalable process.

Digitisation benefits

If harnessed fully, he claims that digitisation can enable banks to bring down compliance costs substantially over the longer term, increase transparency and mitigate the risk of heavy fines or reputational damage.

Once banks automate compliance checks that need to be conducted, operations can be streamlined and resources released that can be deployed more productively on value-added activities, thus boosting efficiency and margins he concludes.

The full article, Digitisation of compliance process a must to prevent trade-based money laundering, can be found here

Categories: Trade Based Financial crimes News