Anti-money laundering campaign strengthens

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that between $800 billion and $2 trillion is being laundered globally each year. Such increase in criminal financial activity spurred governments worldwide to adopt new regulations to prevent criminal financial activity from taking place within financial institutions.

On the local front, the Anti-Money Laundering Act was signed into law to change the Philippines‚ reputation as a country with nearly no anti-money laundering regulations.

But more important, the law deflected possible financial sanctions by industrialized nations.

Just last February, the powerful Financial Action Task Force (FATF) removed the Philippines from its international roster of non-cooperative countries and territories (NCCT).

With a financial intelligence unit (FIU), the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLAC) was then officially let in at the Egmont Group, an elite group of FIU. It was chosen to host in July 2006 the next annual meeting of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG), an autonomous organization that facilitates the adoption, implementation and enforcement of internationally accepted standards against money-laundering and financing of terrorism.

According to lawyer Vicente Aquino, executive director of the AMLAC, there were 1,486 suspicious transactions reported by banks and other covered institutions from Jan. to Aug. 31, 2005. That is a 25-percent increase from a record of 1,186 for the same period in 2004, thus demonstrating local financial institutions‚ increased adoption of AML measures.

The Philippines has also made 32 requests to foreign jurisdictions for assistance in anti-money laundering procedures, and has conversely answered 33 requests from foreign countries including the United States for such assistance as well.

Last month, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) ordered all banks to implement an electronic monitoring system that will detect and monitor money-laundering transactions.

The new ruling requires covered institutions like commercial banks to adopt as part of their money laundering program a "system of flagging and monitoring transactions that qualify as suspicious transactions involving amounts below the threshold to facilitate the process of aggregating them for the purpose of future reporting to the AMLC."

The minimum requirements for such a transaction monitoring system are the following: a statistical analysis and profiling of covered and suspicious transactions; a watch list monitoring that can check transfer parties; an investigation capability which allows it to initiate a check for names appearing repetitively throughout the history of payment stored in the system; and a report generation ability for covered and suspicious transactions.

That is where SAS comes into the picture as it has the latest offering – the SAS® Anti-Money Laundering solution, aimed at protecting organizations from financial crime and meeting anti-money laundering requirements and regulations.

SAS® Anti-Money Laundering is an integrated, open-ended architecture that can take mountains of customer information, manage and refine such information and turn it into usable knowledge that can help automatically identify and classify suspicious behavior. It delivers unparalleled management, detection, tracking, cataloguing and reporting of suspicious activity – which will greatly improve the efficiency of an organization. The system is comprised of five main components: data management; alert engine; investigation; discovery; and administration.