Financial Crime

Providing full comfort for being always compliant with financial crime regulations through efficient operations.

Our experience with a vast range of financial institutions in the CEE region and globally as well as governmental and supervisory bodies (Central Banks, FIUs, UNODC, IMF) allow us to solve problems related to financial crime. The Financial Crime Advisory practice has developed an ecosystem that endeavours to provide an integrated Financial Crime Risk Management set of services and products in various financial crime domains (AML and Sanctions, Fraud).

Financial Crime Compliance

Financial Crime Compliance is the classics of Financial Crime Advisory. The financial services industry continues to face significant scrutiny from global regulators over AML and Sanctions processes, systems and controls. We have created multiple service offerings which cover all the main needs of financial institutions in this area.
 

Determining your Financial Crime risk exposure for a more focussed risk mitigation approach

  • Mapping of Financial Crime risks the organisation is exposed to

  • Qualifying and quantifying inherent risk exposures

  • Identifying and assessing the organisation’s existing control environment and its effectiveness

  • Determining residual risks

  • Applying a risk-based approach to Financial Crime risk management

Understanding the current state and maturity of your Financial Crime programmes

  • Assessing an organisation’s conformity with its legal and regulatory obligations as well as industry good practice. This includes evaluating the actual degree of implementation of the framework and measuring its effectiveness

  • Providing an independent view to management on the soundness and adequacy of AML controls, including recommendations on operational efficiency

Designing your desired Financial Crime framework

  • Reviewing an organisation’s approach to its Financial Crime responsibilities

  • Benchmarking comparison against similar organisations

  • Designing detailed models of how the processes, systems and controls should work to ensure they are both efficient and fit for the purpose

  • Develop a detailed roadmap to get to the target state, including advice on process automation/ productivity enhancements

Making informed decisions when it really matters

  • Financial crime due diligence on acquisition targets

  • Assessment of soundness of AML framework

  • Assessment of sanction risks, including target portfolio re-screening

  • Review of open regulatory topics

  • Preparation of post-acquisition integration plan

Financial Crime Technology and Analytics

Financial Crime Technology and Analytics practice is aimed at advising clients on the range of technology-related topics appearing in the Financial Crime space. We start from vendor selection processes to providing clients with high-end PwC proprietary applications and process accelerators. Our service offering consists of the following categories:

The selection of any Financial Crime system should follow a set of activities to ensure successful investment. We can support all of them:

  • Risk assessment and risk coverage analysis

  • Target solution definition with the detailed business requirements, RFI and RFP preparation

  • Knowledge about the vendor’s landscape to ensure relevant responses

  • Technical evaluation of a proposal, scoring methodology and PoC

The success of any Financial Crime implementation is dependent on

  • How the project is set up

  • How it is executed 

  • What the understanding of the requirements is; and 

  • How the solution is used in production. 

We walk our clients through these challenging projects and support project management, business analysis and design, testing as well as calibration of detection and monitoring rules and algorithms and changes to the processes operation.

Assessment project represents a health check for the transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, customer risk rating or fraud system 

  • Data-driven assessment focussed on the major functionality affecting the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the system

  • Stress testing opening the black box systems and validating their risk coverage

  • A benchmark functionality indicating the position of a financial institution in comparison with its peers

  • Fully automated by our proprietary applications.

Our optimisation framework focusses on finding the right balance between the cost of compliance and appropriate coverage of Financial Crime risks 

  • Combining subject matter expertise and advanced data analytics

  • Supported by our proprietary applications driven by advanced analytics that improve and accelerate the optimisation efforts

Selected client experience:

Assisted a client to reduce false-positive alerts from their sanctions screening solution by more than 60% during year 1 with ongoing calibration in subsequent years, utilizing PwC’s testing and optimization platform supported by a dedicated data science team.

An assessment of a client’s sanction screening solution identified a number of efficiency enhancements allowing for a reduction in the number of false-positive alerts by over 49% in year 1. Supported the client in initial optimisation of their sanction filtering tool in alignment with their risk appetite. Periodic sanction solution optimisation as a service agreed going forward.

During our projects we were able to decrease the number of sanctions alerts by 70%, decrease AML false positives by 49%, and improved the relevancy of alerts utilising anomaly detection algorithms.

Selected solutions

Financial Crime Assessment and Optimisation Enablers

An analytics-driven solution built to improve the performance of AML transaction monitoring systems.

Outputs:

  • Maturity assessment including comparison to peer institutions
  • Suggestions to increase risk coverage
  • Behavioural segmentation to boost scenario tuning
  • Scenario tuning to decrease the number of false alerts
  • Predictive model for scoring alerts
  • Technical specification (link to https://appdev.pwc.com/case-study/financial-crime-suite)

Sanctions testing

Do you trust your sanctions filter?

Our Sanctions testing application will provide you with the comfort of understanding your screening filter's ability to stop real sanctioned names and variations thereof. You can use these results to adjust the screening configuration, implement better controls and also perform a retest every time you update your screening configuration.

With Sanctions testing application, you will:

  • Be able to create customized transaction and reference data test files in your own custom format
  • Have the ability to identify and measure your screening system effectiveness 
  • Easily identify the missed names and common false negative patterns
  • Always use the latest sanctioned records to test your screening system

More Info

Sanctions efficiency optimisation

Using our Sanctions efficiency optimisation tool, we are able to perform data-driven analysis of your historical false positive alerts and identify the key drivers behind them. With our tool you will be able to understand:

  • The contribution of each sanctions list and even sanctioned name to the overall number of alerts
  • The contribution of each screened format, MT type, and field to the alerts created
  • The most common combinations of screened name and sanctioned name that create the false positives
  • The steps that you need to take (new business rules, screening exceptions, list updates,...) to improve your efficiency and their impact

PwC's Financial Crime Talks

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The Fraud Risk Management Puzzle

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PwC Discussion Series 1

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PwC Discussion Series 2

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PwC Discussion Series 3

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PwC Discussion Series 4

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PwC Discussion Series 5

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PwC Discussion Series 6

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PwC Discussion Series 7

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PwC Discussion Series 8

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PwC Discussion Series 9

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PwC Discussion Series 10

     

Financial Crime blog

Contacts

Liviu Chirita

Liviu Chirita

Partner, Financial Crime Advisory, PwC Czech Republic

Tel: +420 774 977 596

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