Clarity on Financial Crime in Banking

Switzerland as an international financial center is exposed to huge risks from financial crime. This is increased by outdated transaction monitoring systems, inadequate approaches to Know Your Customer and poorly determined risk appetites.

How banks must step up the challenge in the fight against financial crime

As value chains become more hyper-connected and criminals more sophisticated, the potential impacts of financial crime are growing. Yet, banks aren’t investing enough in specialists and systems to counter this threat. There’s an urgent need to improve risk profiling, compliance cultures and the use of artificial intelligence tools.

How can we support you?

Contact our experts

Four guiding principles for Swiss banks to more effectively combat financial crimes

Swiss banks must rise to the challenge of detecting and preventing financial crime

More precise, bank-specific risk assessments must become a priority for Switzerland’s banks. To enhance the quality of alerts it furthermore requires qualitative improvements in areas such as client databases, transaction monitoring systems, and the usage of artificial intelligence.
The human factor: filling gaps with specialist knowledge

The detection and prevention of financial crime would be significantly improved through greater investments in specialist support to raise the quality of data and analysis.
Critical components for robust compliance: strong culture, tone at the top and an effective sanction system

A strong compliance culture and appropriate tone from the top is important, but is not by itself sufficient to prevent financial crime. Actually enforcing sanctions against employees who breach compliance policies is likewise essential.
MROS notifications must be based on quality

It is the responsibility of banks to ensure that MROS notifications are appropriate and necessary, and that the motivation behind the notification is correct. By swamping the MROS with low quality notifications, banks could be limiting its ability to effectively filter and forward cases to law enforcement agencies. Ironically, the increase in inappropriate notifications ultimately produces a riskier environment.