During a round table discussion hosted by Facctum in Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa, financial crime risk management technology experts highlighted the challenges of sanctions watchlist screening.

The discussion focused on the growing complexity and difficulties faced by organisations in managing watchlist screening, emphasising the need for effective solutions in this area.

Deneshree Govender, Head of Regulatory Risk and Compliance at Stanlib, highlighted key emerging trends in anti-money laundering (AML), such as cryptocurrency, cybercrime, and the frequency of updates to sanction lists.

She added, “Businesses don’t always have the necessary tools and resources to meet the obligatory requirements with speed, adequacy, effectiveness and efficiency. If they don’t, they face greylisting, penalties, and losing the trust of customers. Over the years, the watchlist has been one of the best and most viable controls businesses use to help protect the organisation".

Chrisol Correia, Chief Strategy Officer at Facctum, stressed the importance of understanding sanctions, customer behaviour, and risk profiles in implementing effective controls. He said, relative to screening or transaction monitoring, watchlist management is vitally important. “A lot of the issues further downstream can be resolved by watchlist management, notably with false positives and alert volumes, but also in terms of compliance effectiveness. It’s becoming more imperative that the right data is implemented in the right place and at the right time.”

Nicolas Willard, Head of Business Development, EMEA at Facctum, presented Facctum's financial crime compliance solutions to address screening and watchlist management challenges. He highlighted the FacctList watchlist management solution, which streamlines processes by presenting only relevant data, rather than overwhelming users with excessive information. 

FacctList is a purpose-built platform available as a SaaS or on-premise solution, that allows organisations to automatically reconcile data with original sanctions sources and can be customised to suit various screening scenarios like transaction and client screening, trade finance, credit cards, or cross-border payments. For more information, please read the full article. 

External link to the article