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    • 02 Aug 2022
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    Back office

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    Article Summary

    Synctera Anti-Money Laundering (AML)

    Achieve compliance and fight money laundering

    With an estimated $800 million - $2 trillion laundered by criminals globally each year, money laundering is a serious concern for both FinTechs and their bank partners. Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations aim to make it difficult for criminals to launder funds derived from criminal activities.

    To comply with these regulations, FinTechs and their bank partners must deploy a range of procedures, including monitoring transactions and reporting on suspicious activity. Failure to adequately do so can result in serious reputational damage for the FinTech and its bank partner, and regulatory fines for the bank partner.

    Benefits

    Synctera Anti-Money Laundering (AML) helps prevent and detect money laundering by enabling FinTechs to streamline AML programs with their bank partners, from AML checks and transaction monitoring to case management and report filing.

    Remain compliant: Ensure you fulfill your obligations with respect to AML regulations.

    Manage risk: Protect yourself and your bank partner by mitigating exposure to regulatory and reputational risk.

    Increase operational efficiency: Automate and streamline AML workflows.

    Complete transparency: You and your bank partner both have full visibility into all AML investigations and related actions across your customer base.

    Scalable: Our enterprise solution supports AML compliance as you scale.

    Key features

    Configurable rules: Define granular AML monitoring rules to meet the unique needs of both you and your bank partner

    Cases: A case workflow helps facilitate further investigation for any alerts

    AML checks: Automatically perform AML checks on your customers and accounts

    Configurable workflow: Define each step of the operational workflow, including users, permissions, escalations and scheduling

    Alerts: Notify the correct contact at your partner bank by email when a new AML case is created

    Transaction monitoring: Automatically screen transactions for suspicious activity

    Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs): As an AML regulatory requirement, submit SARs to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)

    How it works

    1. You and your bank partner collaborate with Synctera to configure the appropriate AML monitoring rules and operational workflow according to your bank partner’s risk appetite and policies
    2. Synctera aggregates customer, account, and transaction data and automatically sends a daily AML file to our AML partner for processing
    3. Our partner’s platform automatically executes AML checks based on pre-defined rules and thresholds
    4. When further investigation is required, a case is automatically created in the Synctera platform for review and action by your bank partner
    5. The pre-defined AML analyst at your bank partner is notified by email when a new case is created and assigned
    6. The AML analyst investigates and then sends to the bank’s AML officer for final review
    7. The bank’s AML officer reviews the escalated cases and, if required, submits a SAR

    Synctera Cases

    Manage compliance and operations in a fully-featured case management system

    Managing compliance tasks as well as day-to-day interactions with your bank partner by email, shared drives, and spreadsheets is time-consuming and prone to human error. It also leaves a cumbersome audit trail for regulatory compliance and risk management purposes.

    With Synctera Cases, both you and your bank partner can oversee all interactions between you, your bank partner, and your customers from the Cases tab of the Synctera Console. Our case management solution also serves as a support portal where you and your bank partner can monitor questions, errors, and issues that arise.

    Benefits

    Reduce manual work and human error: Eliminate emails and manual tracking of bank and end-customer interactions with automated workflows, configurable assignments, and role-specific views/permissions.

    Streamline and accelerate operations: A centralized framework for creating, approving and resolving cases makes it easier for staff to manage a range of day-to-day customer onboarding, support, and compliance processes.

    Gauge the health of your bank partnership: Gain visibility across all types of interactions between you and your bank partner - at the user, account, and transaction level.

    Maintain a clean audit trail: Record all tasks associated with the partnership, including approvals for materials subject to Reg DD, UDAAP, privacy regulations, and more.

    Key features

    Stay engaged and take action on a range of cases, including:

    Risk and compliance

    Know Your Customer (KYC)/Know Your Business (KYB) - Keep track of follow ups on customers that your KYC/KYB system flags as suspicious, at onboarding and throughout the customer lifecycle.

    Customer alerts - Take action on any alerts that come up for your customers and determine what to do with their accounts. These could be alerts like a customer being added to a watchlist or a business customer going bankrupt.

    Anti-Money Laundering (AML) - Keep track of follow ups on transactions that your AML system flags as potentially money laundering. You will also need to send these transactions to your bank partner.

    Fraud - Review transactions that your fraud monitoring system flags as potentially fraudulent, investigate them as necessary, and keep track of documentation and decisions. 

    Marketing and disclosures

    Marketing materials - Your bank partner will have to review most of the marketing material you plan to release to ensure it meets regulatory guidelines. You will be able to send them the material and let them know how, when, and where you plan on using it.  

    Disclosures - Depending on which products you offer, you will need to provide different disclosures to your customers. Synctera Cases will help track this for you, and if you miss a disclosure or two for a customer the system will let you know which disclosures were missed so that you can reach out to the customer.

    Customer service

    Disputes and complaints - At times customers may want to dispute a transaction. When they do you will need to document the investigation process and timeline to show an auditable history of why the dispute was accepted or rejected.

    Custom card review - If you offer cards for which customers can provide a personal background image, you will have to review those images to ensure they meet specific guidelines. When a user provides an image, Synctera Cases will create a case for you to review and decide whether or not to allow the image to be printed on the customer’s card.

    Administrative

    Reconciliation - When you work with a bank partner to power your financial product’s accounts and money movement, on a daily basis your bank will need to reconcile your transaction history against both the bank’s general ledger (GL) and the various payments networks. When records don’t match, transactions must be traced back to identify and resolve discrepancies. 

    Interest calculation - This case type is related to interest-bearing accounts, which you may or may not offer. If an interest-bearing account receives a backdated inbound transaction with an effective date of more than 90 days in the past, a case is created for your operations team to manually post an interest correction to the customer’s account.

    Billing and invoices - Pay your Synctera bill, and receive your share of interchange revenue earned on your card program(s). Synctera Cases allows you to configure the accounts you would like to pay and get paid from so that funds movement can be automated.

    Information requests - When working with your bank partner and a FinTech platform like Synctera, you will need to get information from one or the other for things like what is required for offering a new product, or requests to make changes to configured fraud/AML/KYC/KYB rules. These requests can be created and tracked through the system rather than getting lost in email.

    How it works

    1. Synctera Cases aggregates interactions across all services and solutions.
    2. A summary of interactions is displayed in the Cases tab of the Synctera Console, comparing results against benchmarks, such as the total number of customers versus KYC checks completed.
    3. Within each case, assigned users can take action, communicate with each other, update status and resolve issues.
    4. Each case status and outcome is tracked for full visibility and compliance purposes.

    Synctera Reconciliation

    Streamline account and transaction reconciliation processes

    When you work with a bank partner to power your financial product’s accounts and money movement, on a daily basis you will need to reconcile your transaction history against both the bank’s general ledger (GL) and the various payments networks to ensure there are no missing transactions or funds. The bank has a fiduciary responsibility to ensure each transaction on their side matches your transaction history and the balances of the For Benefit Of (FBO) accounts, which hold the funds of your customers. When records don’t match, transactions must be traced back to identify and resolve discrepancies, which can be a tedious and time-consuming daily process. With Synctera Reconciliation, the process is automated. Our fast and efficient model properly processes and controls transactional, operational, and reference data.

    Benefits

    Track money movement: Use a bottom-up reconciliation process to easily track transactions

    Enhance efficiency: Automate manual reconciliation processes so banks can redeploy resources to value-added activities

    Increase speed and accuracy: Match FBO account and sub-ledger balances quickly and precisely

    Manage exceptions: Alerts and intuitive search capabilities make it easy to find and resolve exceptions

    How it works

    Synctera provides banks with your complete transaction history, enabling the bank to easily balance your FBO accounts and settle with the payment networks on your behalf. In the event of a discrepancy, the Synctera platform includes a streamlined case management workflow, matching methodology, and escalation process.

    1. Transactions are automatically reconciled across files and providers.
    2. Unique reconciliation identifiers are assigned for each transaction.
    3. Probable matches are identified and exceptions manually updated to achieve reconciliation.

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