For many businesses – especially those operating in the financial services sector – anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) processes are crucial in ensuring that companies are maintaining regulatory compliance and monitoring for suspicious activity. To stay on top of AML and KYC requirements, organisations must ensure they have the ability to adequately plan and manage resource and capacity, so that staff efficiency and impact is maximised in what is a closely scrutinised area of business operations. This is according to ActiveOps.

The recent fiasco at Danske Bank, which involved millions of Kroner being laundered through the company’s Estonian branch, is considered as one of the biggest scandals of its kind in history and resulted in a huge public backlash and a devastating drop in customer satisfaction and trust. While solving this particular issue will take a huge amount of cross-European collaboration and a detailed review of current regulations, it should serve as a warning for any organisation not doing everything in their power to minimise the risk of falling into the money laundering trap.

Kuljit Bawa, Managing Director, EMEA at ActiveOps, said: “AML and KYC are areas where banks and other organisations clearly need to tread very carefully – the Danske Bank scandal is an example of what can happen if suspicious activity is allowed to slip through the net. Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of each individual company to make sure they are compliant, so it is vital that they have the processes and technologies in place that reduce the chances of being compromised to an absolute minimum.”

For Bawa, one way to assist is to carefully manage capacity in a way that is both transparent and intuitive, as this ensures that time and employee resources are always invested in the right areas and on the right tasks. This should also include being open to automating processes where possible.

He added: “AML and KYC requirements can only be met with a well-functioning back office, where operations managers are easily able to balance resources and work, enabling them to make better informed decisions about what skills to deploy and when and where to deploy them. By implementing digital operations management technology, businesses can identify capacity shortfalls in advance, meaning that they can avoid compromising service performance, which in turn reduces exposure to regulatory failures and enables compliance to be achieved at optimum cost.

“Such technology also assists in maximising the impact of automation and balancing its presence with the ongoing role of human staff. By gaining a better understanding of the demands that automation places on the organisation and how best to implement it, managers can reap the rewards of capabilities such as robotic process automation (RPA) without reducing the quality of service.”

He concluded: “Regulations may well change in the wake of the Danske Bank situation, but banks and other companies juggling AML and KYC requirements should realise that there’s plenty they can do in the here and now to remain compliant. Getting on top of back office operations can be a strong place to start.”