Digital reporting of suspicious cases

MROS is preparing for the fight against money laundering

Zug, Jul 2019

Suspected cases of money laundering in the Swiss financial centre must be recorded on a web portal of the relevant authority in future. For this reportings, financial service providers can benefit from ready-made solutions provided by specialised companies such as Confinale: There is no need to reinvent the wheel. It just needs to work.

Digitisation is racing ahead and is now also moving into a traditionally paper-heavy area of the financial world: the Swiss Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland (MROS) will introduce an electronic system for the transmission and processing of suspicious cases as of 1 January 2020. The new web portal is based on goAML, a piece of software developed by the United Nations that is already in use in numerous countries. This gives financial intermediaries the opportunity to upload the finished report to the portal in a convenient way - provided all the criteria relating to the content and format of the report are complied with.

This brings us to the other side of the coin: Digitisation requires both systematisation and standardisation. With the goAML application used here, the users, i.e. reporting banks, come under pressure. Before a suspicious case can be reported electronically, all the steps of an IT project have to be gone through: Analysis, conception, specification and technical implementation of the reporting.

Confinale's standardised MROS reporting solution offers the obvious efficiency advantage that analysis and specification are already done and that most of the development is pre-modelled. Therefore, it only needs to be adapted to the specific needs of the bank. In terms of costs, timeframe and quality, this approach is far better than in-house development.

 

 

When developing our MROS reporting, it was important to us to be able to offer customers the full benefits of a standard product without losing flexibility. The entire process takes place in the Avaloq core banking system. Therefore, the core information for the message, the transactions made, can be retrieved at any time and can be selected by the user with flexibility. The solution combines a maximum possible degree of automation with full transparency and adaptability. The latter was made possible in particular by the innovative validation and correction functionality, whereby the tedious trial-and-error method of transmitting an electronic message becomes a thing of the past.

The big opportunity of such a central change lies in the high degree of efficiency: if everyone is in the same boat, you only need one engine to bring everyone to their destination. Confinale took on this role as the driving force for the Avaloq community during the conversion to the goAML software. Numerous Avaloq banks have already opted for Confinale's MROS reporting; and Avaloq Sourcing (Switzerland & Liechtenstein) SA also recommends this solution to their clients.

The flexibility of an Avaloq solution in combination with Confinale's consulting expertise means that customers can benefit from a tailor-made and cost-efficient product. This includes the integration of all customer-specific parameterizations, the architecture landscape and, if necessary, the adaptation for branch offices in other countries where goAML reporting is used.

Would you like to learn more about our MROS reporting solution? Contact us or read more about this product here.