Large enterprises in Africa are responsible for protecting their customers from fraud and illegal activities. This is especially true for telcos and financial service providers dealing with thousands of daily transactions. 4C Group offers innovative software, called iNSight, that can seamlessly integrate into an enterprise’s revenue assurance and business assurance processes.
Within these services, 4C Group can help large organisations prevent money laundering by customers and criminals. This is absolutely critical at a time when South Africa is facing grey-listing by the UN’s Financial Action Task Force for a lacklustre application of global anti-money laundering regulations. According to historical data, countries that are grey-listed lose around two percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) as a result.
It is crucial that enterprises stay on the right side of regulatory requirements by including a comprehensive anti-money laundering solution in their services. This will not only protect the business and its legitimate customers from fraud and illicit cash, but it will also ensure that global standards are adhered to, which improves the customer experience and lifetime retention of clients.
What is anti-money laundering?
Money laundering is the process of converting illegally obtained money into ‘legal’ cash through various means. Therefore, anti-money laundering is the preventative measures put in place to stop enterprises from being used as the vessel for the conversion. Telcos, mobile money operators and financial institutions are particularly susceptible to being used in money laundering schemes.
There are typically three stages to laundering money:
- Placement – Putting illegal cash into a legitimate financial system by hiding its source.
- Layering – This restructuring hides the source through a series of smaller transactions or accounting tricks.
- Integration – The smaller bits of laundered cash are withdrawn and recovered, however, they now appear to have come from a legitimate source.
This process is used by individual criminals, terrorist groups, organised crime units and, sometimes, other businesses to ‘clean’ their illicit cash. Anti-money laundering laws and regulations are becoming increasingly strict and enterprises are expected to put systems into place to prevent these activities.
How 4C’s anti-money laundering services work
Our iNSight Anti-Money Laundering solution enables the implementation of best practice controls to manage and mitigate our clients’ identified fraud and money laundering risks. It offers integrated capabilities that include automated risk-rating, watchlist screening, automated transaction monitoring and case management. Non-function features include comprehensive data integration, rules-based detection models, automated reporting and advanced presentation capabilities.
Our key focus area is to manage, detect, mitigate and prevent risks for mobile network operators (MNOs), mobile money services and financial institutions. iNSight collects user data and screens it against global watchlists in order to identify customers, merchants or companies that are sanctioned or politically exposed.
Our anti-money laundering software also allows us to perform automated risk assessments and give enterprise customers a risk rating. This enables our clients to focus on their biggest-risk customers. This risk-based approach adheres to the UN’s guidelines and improves efficiency and effectiveness when it comes to tracking illicit transactions and fraud.
The software has built-in security features to prevent confidential customer data from being compromised. Only authorised users will have access to data streams and the valuable information that is processed through the iNSight software and the CRM. These access restrictions ensure that the enterprise protects the information of its customers, according to the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act.
African enterprises that are not yet compliant with international regulations for anti-money laundering need to act soon. Our automated software and systems make this process simple and efficient. With automatic reporting and alerts, business leaders can ensure that they remain fully aware of any illicit or potentially illegal transactions through their companies. For more information about our anti-money laundering services, please contact us today.
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At 4C Group of Companies, we strive to effect operational changes and cost savings for customers through our iNSight product and associated services. This product’s main function is to re-purpose and deliver business-critical information to a variety of systems and stakeholders.
We specialise in information assurance, business assurance, FinTech solutions and a variety of business systems. For more insights into our products and services, check out our blog page or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
