EU Commission to tackle money laundering – increasing pressure on banks to innovate
Munich, July 20, 2021 - For some days now, it is all over town: The EU Commission is planning to tighten money laundering regulation and is even planning to create an independent authority (Anti-Money Laundering Authority, in short AMLA). Its job: to coordinate the institutions and authorities of the EU member states and make them more successful in fighting financial crime and terrorist financing.
Our CEO, Tobias Schweiger, welcomes the development: "It is absolutely in the interest of a more effective fight against money laundering if the European Union finds more common ground in implementation in the future. However, the revised regulation should also trigger a fresh start in AML practices of financial institutions. After all, what is urgently needed is a legal framework for the secure exchange of information between banks and a technical infrastructure that can effectively and collectively monitor trillions of transactions."
The anti-money laundering solutions of most banks, including those in Germany, are technically outdated and have long since failed to meet the increased requirements for the forward-looking detection of suspicious transactions and the efficient verification of millions of payment transactions every day. “In the context of the seemingly planned new EU Money Laundering Regulation, the regulatory requirements for banks will continue to intensify and with them, I hope, the pressure to innovate", says Hawk AI CEO Tobias Schweiger. "They are not up to the task with the prevailing legacy systems, which produce enormous amounts of false-positive alerts and overburden anti-money laundering departments with irrelevant transactions. It's time for a fresh start in this key compliance area."
The conditions for such a fresh start are good, says Tobias Schweiger: "Today, it is legally permitted and also, in the context of the cloud strategies sought by many banks, technically possible to run transaction monitoring on a contemporary technological basis."