Compliance Newsflashes: Erste Bank Group Selects Norkom to Combat Financial Crime, and more

Erste Bank Group Selects Norkom to Combat Financial Crime

Erste Bank Group, a Central European financial services group that provides banking, investment, loan and insurance services, has signed a contract to deploy financial crime software solutions by Dublin, Ireland-based Norkom Technologies across its central European business operations.

The software suite encompasses anti-money laundering (AML) applications, which will provide Erste Bank Group with the ability to effectively monitor, detect, investigate and report on suspicious activities or unusual behavior across all of its operating units and business lines. Norkom Technologies will initially deploy its AML application in Erste Bank Group's Czech subsidiary, Ceska sporitelna, and its Slovak company, Slovenska sporitel'na. This will be followed by full deployment across all of the Group's other business operations in Austria, Hungary, Croatia and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

"Erste Bank Group is committed to protecting its business, shareholders and customers in the fight against money laundering activities and financing terrorism," said Leopold Fetterle, money laundering reporting officer, Erste Bank Group, in the press release. "The Norkom solution enables us to adopt a fully integrated approach to how we manage the prevention of financial crime in our business in a state-of-the-art manner."

Nedbank Deploys Searchspace's Anti-Money Laundering Solution

Nedbank, the principal banking entity of Nedcor, has selected a best practice anti-money laundering (AML) solution by London-based Searchspace. Nedcor is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa and offers a wide range of wholesale and retail banking services, operating through a network of branches in Southern Africa and the United Kingdom.

In South Africa, the Financial Intelligence Center Act 2001 (FICA) imposed duties on certain institutions to introduce new anti-money laundering requirements, which include the training of employees, reporting of suspicious transactions to the Financial Intelligence Center (FIC) and the retention of client information. In June 2003, South Africa was granted membership in the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental body that develops and promotes polices to combat money laundering.

Searchspace software enables organizations to interpret and act upon vast amounts of data automatically, assisting regulatory compliance, risk mitigation and brand protection. Every transaction is monitored for unusual activity, immediately notifying compliance staff about those that may require further investigation and providing them with an evidential audit to manage the compliance process effectively.

"In order to strengthen our anti-money laundering efforts, we wanted to use the most effective and proven AML solution available on the global market today that could be easily integrated into our existing systems, capable of rapid deployment and built on Best Practice," said Andre Wentzel, group money laundering control officer at Nedcor, in the press release.