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Metavante application aimed at compliance

Fraud detection tool also helping banks nab money launderers

Make Money Online By Chris Fleissner • 06/14/06 Milwaukee, Wis. - A new automated anti-money laundering application capable of detecting and analyzing suspicious financial transactions is helping banks comply with federal regulations governing banking security.

In a move to support clients working to comply with regulatory requirements specified under The USA Patriot Act and the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the Milwaukee-based Metavante Corp., the financial technology subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley Corp, recently integrated the BSA Reporter into 10 client banks.

BSA Reporter is designed to facilitate the record keeping and reporting requirements banks must meet under existing financial regulations. Metavante will be equipping banks with the means to alert law enforcement to any of the diverse and complex patterns used by money laundering operations.

According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that monitors bank compliance, the BSA, formally known as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act, is a tool used to fight over 170 crimes listed in federal money laundering statutes, including gun running, murder for hire, and drug trafficking.

Although detecting money laundering is notoriously knotty work, Metavante has presented the BSA Reporter as a tool for unraveling suspect transfer patterns that might otherwise go undetected.

A central step in the prevailing method of money laundering is called "layering." By utilizing an ostensibly legitimate series of financial transactions, such as converting proceeds from criminal activity into traveler's checks, money orders, wire transfers, letters of credit, stocks, bonds, or purchasing valuable assets such as jewelry, a criminal can filter or "clean" ill-gotten gains under the noses of unknowing banks and financial institutions.

Although questions remain about software reliability and fraud detection success rates, the BSA Reporter application is designed to compete with these layers of complex financial transactions by using a number of functions, including suspicious activity detection, customer and peer group profiling, and rules-based analytics.

The Bank of Hawaii is the first client in production with BSA Reporter on an application service provider platform.

Representatives from Metavante Corp. and the Bank of Hawaii could not be reached for comment before press time.

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