How compliance officers fight reputational risks using data technology

Regulatory scrutiny of financial institutions has increased dramatically over the last decade, making the job of banks’ compliance officers ever more critical and intensive. A vast number of functions and responsibilities have been added to compliance officers’ responsibilities, as part of enterprise-wide data governance mandates.

New client expectations have also led financial institutions to revamp their transaction banking businesses through innovations such as instant payments, end-to-end transaction visibility and the use of the extended ISO 20022 messaging formats, which are all contributing to a richer experience for end-customers.

This evolution is making the compliance function more complex as additional payment instruments, data sets and sources are added to the compliance equation. But while compliance officers are being tasked to guide compliant human behaviour around the use of data, they also need to deliver the appropriate technology environment for their teams to perform as efficiently as possible. Several challenges threaten to disrupt their journey.

Data-related challenges

Financial institutions are under immense regulatory pressure to analyse transactional flows and identify suspicious activity. Compliance officers are tasked to continuously scrutinise transactions; to do this efficiently, easy access to transaction details is a must. It is however not a trivial endeavour as transactions are usually processed by a multitude of internal systems, and transaction data is rarely centralised in a single system. Furthermore, manual aggregation of transaction details for analysis and reporting often leads to delays and is prone to errors. It has thus become vital for compliance officers to have easy, single-window access to all transaction details and the history of related events.

While having a central repository of all transaction data (including related events) would be ideal for the fight against fraud – as well as to support other critical data-intensive functions – it is not a reality for most financial institutions due to disparate data sources, geographic locations and gaps in systems integration. However, reconciling as much data together as possible to maintain data integrity, consistency and control can enhance fraud monitoring, analysis, and insight development. Banks achieving this will not be trivial given the high number of operational frictions that compliance officers face in their daily tasks.

These challenges all point towards a critical need to address the underlying issues in transaction data management. To this end, well-established high-performance infrastructure, coupled with targeted process optimisation, is key to enhancing operational efficiency for compliance officers.

Granularity is key

The data accessibility challenge is usually the top obstacle for compliance officers to perform their job efficiently. By specialising in trailing and tracing transaction details, Intix provides financial institutions with the technology infrastructure addressing a range of compliance, operational and business needs. Its platform provides a global view on financial transactions across a myriad of internal systems is of particular interest to compliance officers.

Similarly, the options to automate some functions – such as transaction reporting and alerting – provide critical value to compliance officers and various other teams within financial institutions.

Better access to transaction data

Financial institutions are hungry for insights on their transaction operations as this allows them to better understand their own activities and their client behaviours. However, manual aggregation of transaction details always leads to delays and errors. It has therefore become vital to achieve easy, single-window access to transaction details across various sources.

Intix helps compliance officers face this accessibility challenge. Its data management technology provides compliance officers with instant access to original transaction details whether stored in long-term archives or in production systems, whilst recognising all past and current financial messaging formats. Banks are able to easily navigate through huge data sets as the platform allows for instantaneous searching, ad hoc reporting and dashboarding. The solution also integrates seamlessly with legacy systems and minimises technical integration whilst guaranteeing data integrity to deliver the single version of the truth.

With Intix, compliance officers can increase their level of responsiveness as all necessary data sources become available in real time. This enables them to program their reporting tasks, and promptly respond to ad-hoc regulatory requests.

The convenience offered by Intix to support repetitive manual tasks such as searching (including full text), and reporting provide stellar value to compliance officers.

Smart infrastructure equals maximised data accessibility

Keeping an eye on your transaction data has become a strategic priority given ever-demanding regulatory requirements. This can now be achieved seamlessly thanks to specialised technology.

Going forward, those financial institutions with the best data systems will develop a competitive advantage as effective use of transaction data helps financial institutions become more agile and increase client satisfaction.

By implementing Intix, financial institutions can equip themselves with the smart infrastructure needed to maximise data accessibility to support their own tasks.

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• Data Protection