What does the 4MLD mean for businesses?

June 2017 Kompli-Global

Money laundering exploits vulnerabilities in financial systems that allow for anonymity and opaqueness when carrying out financial transactions. Research shows that serious and organised crime costs the UK at least £24 billion every year.

The European Union’s fourth Money Laundering Directive (4MLD) was mandated to come into effect in all EU member states by 26 June. This is being adopted under The Money Laundering Regulations 2017 in the United Kingdom.

One of the government’s challenges is to ensure UK businesses comply, not only because of the moral imperative, but because after Brexit, the UK will want to further strengthen the integrity, stability and reputation of its financial sector. The need to thoroughly search for adverse information on customers and evidence this has been done will be challenging. Carrying out Customer Due Diligence (CDD) manually is going to be demanding, particularly if the target entity is based abroad.

Which sectors will be affected?
More businesses offering financial services to their customers, or handling customers’ funds, will be obliged to comply with the regulations than before. These include, but are not limited to: financial institutions, banks, building societies, insurers, accountants, auditors, estate agents and casinos.

What are the main challenges businesses will face?
Manual web searching is time consuming and often hit and miss. One simple case can take between a day and a week of work, and may result in important information being overlooked or hidden from researchers.

What happens if businesses fail to comply?
Penalties for non-compliance range from unlimited fines on individuals and companies, to being stripped of the ability to carry on a management role in a regulated business and companies losing their licence to operate.

How can Kompli-Global help? Technology and human expertise combine as a powerful defence against money laundering and Kompli-Global is harnessing the power of both. To meet these challenges, Kompli-Global has launched a unique search platform, kompli-IQ™. In addition, we offer tailored Due Diligence reports.

What makes kompli-IQ™ worthwhile?
kompli-IQ™, a multi-lingual, licensed software as a service (SaaS) search platform, uses proprietary machine learning technology to interrogate a wide variety of global information sources, including those invisible to search engines,for published adverse information on individuals and entities.

Using Artificial Intelligence produces quicker and more accurate results. It allows records to be saved and future searches scheduled for on-going monitoring. The bots do all the hard work, leaving the human researcher to view new results found and make a reliable, evidence-based risk assessment.

Bespoke Due Diligence reports
Kompli-Global offers bespoke Due Diligence reports when clients want or need to take a deeper look. To compile these reports, we draw upon local expertise from over 150 regions. With this level of input, Kompli-Global can provide the most in-depth information to help businesses make risk-based decisions and, importantly, provide the audit trail a regulator will demand.