From Marriott to the Democratic National Convention to Yahoo!, significant data breaches have become practically normalized. This is, of course, nonsense; privacy is a fundamental right and the fact that major organizations cannot guarantee your digital privacy is an enormous problem. While compromised email addresses and passwords are one thing, the recent crack of data and analytics company Ascension’s Elasticsearch-based database spilled more than 24 million banking and financial documents onto the web for an all-you-can-steal buffet. For companies, this should be a giant flashing red light that says, “Ensure your security is up to snuff.”
Financial services companies comprise a significant portion of the Attivio client base. In fact, 8 of the world's top 10 banks work with us to address a variety of opportunities in risk and compliance, customer support, and knowledge management. Two events held last week focused on the risk and compliance scenarios and how modern, machine-learning based search can help improve investigator productivity, decrease false positives, and protect the brand.
Financial services organizations know that failure to effectively monitor trade communications exposes them to a tremendous amount of risk. Whether the risk is driven by the dissemination of sensitive information, inappropriate employee behavior, or a violation of regulatory policies, it’s imperative that firms confidently mitigate these risks so they can protect brand value.This is the reality organizations face and why it’s so important to monitor communications proactively.
Remember the Panama Papers? Those were the 11.5 million leaked documents detailing attorney–client information for more than 214,000 offshore companies associated with Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that specializes in setting up offshore shell companies. Many of these companies were set up to “hide” money so wealthy individuals could evade taxes. Others seemed part of money laundering schemes.
It’s been just about two years since the documents were leaked to journalist Bastian Obermayer from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Since then, as documents continue to be reviewed, a thriving cottage industry has grown up around reporting the suspicions, investigations, allegations, revelations, and prosecutions stemming from the Panama Papers.
As I’ve mentioned in prior blogs, the biggest use cases we see in Hadoop these days come from the risk and compliance functions of large banks. Initially, many banks and other financial services institutions (FSIs) adopted Hadoop out of sheer necessity despite its early immaturity on the governance front. With primary analytic use cases such as Know Your Customer, eCommunications Surveillance, and Anti-Money Laundering, FSIs need analytic solutions that can run at massive scale—the Hadoop sweet spot.
An entire ecosystem of tools and data processing frameworks have grown up around Hadoopas companies are building out a modern data architecture. Almost as soon as someone identifies a weakness or limitation—and there have been more than a few—someone else creates a fix. That's one of the reasons the Big Data ecosystem is so complex. And why many large companies hung back before jumping in. They wanted to see if any leaders would emerge from the chaos.
Leading researchers at IDG recently surveyed more than 50 high-level IT and business executives at mid- to large-size companies to learn more about their governance, risk, and compliance practices. One key takeaway from the survey is that manual data collection, analysis, and reporting can create unnecessary burdens that reduce the accuracy and efficiency of investigations into money laundering and other suspicious financial activity.
In some cases, what happens in Vegas is just too good to keep in Vegas. Here are some highlights from ACAMS 15th Annual AML and Financial Crime Conference.
From September 26-28, risk and compliance officers and other professionals packed this important industry event to learn about anti-money laundering; risk management strategies; innovative technology solutions; regulatory and law enforcement news; and other hot topics in the world of fighting financial crime. 2500 attendees came from a wide array of industries, including: financial institutions, casinos, accounting firms, insurance companies, law enforcement and regulatory agencies, law firms, technology providers, universities and other organizations.
Agenda Highlights
Here are some of the Attivio team’s favorite sessions:
To stay in compliance with rapidly expanding international, federal, and local AML regulations and avoid what can be career- and business-ending consequences, companies face the seemingly Herculean task of investigating every suspicious financial transaction, which can number in the tens of thousands every single month.
Some of these challenges will be addressed at the Association for Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) Conference in Las Vegas later this month. In his presentation, “Achieving Compliance Efficiencies Amid Heightened Regulatory Scrutiny,” Lee Phillips, Product Manager for Attivio’s Anti-Money Laundering Investigator, will explain how technology can change the investigative process, substantially transforming productivity and ensuring more accurate case resolution.
In the month since FINRA announced total of $17 million in fines against financial adviser Raymond James and its financial services affiliate, two threads have circulated through social media. The first took note that broker-dealers were now squarely in the enforcement sights of regulators. The second focused on the piercing of the corporate veil and the penalties administered to James’ former AML Compliance officer.
