An anti-money laundering compliance solution for the insurance industry equips insurers with the capabilities to identify financial crime, fulfill regulatory requirements, and safeguard their business by employing advanced monitoring, risk assessment, and automated compliance functions.
With tighter sanctions and regulations all over the world, managing anti-money laundering (AML) compliance has become the main concern for the insurance sector. The risk of money laundering through insurance is on the rise, especially in the case of life insurance products, investment-linked products, and high-value policies. Hence, an effective AML compliance solution for the insurance sector is not only the key to ensuring regulatory compliance but also necessary to protect the brand and maintain operational integrity in the dynamic risk environment.
There are many ways for the insurance industry to be involved in laundering illicit money, some of which are overpayment of the premium, surrendering a policy ahead of time, beneficiary manipulation, or hiding the transactions in the string of cross-border activities. Criminal enterprises know these loopholes by heart and take advantage of them in the least monitored locations which are not usually banks. On the other hand, as regulators set insurance industry AML standards closer to those of banks, it is high time for insurance companies to embrace stringent, tech-powered compliance solutions addressing their specific risk profiles.
The latest AML compliance solution for insurance focuses on compliance life cycles management by the first step, the customer due diligence, and then subsequentially monitoring and reporting.<br> Risk evaluation of the customer done automatically accelerates the process of the identification of policyholders, beneficiaries, and intermediaries who demonstrate high-risk profiles as well as their directions at the starting phase. Facilitators such as location, product, payment behavior, and customer's background allow providers to offer enhanced due diligence (EDD) to only those customers that really need it and without hampering normal business flows.
Another important element to the accomplishment of AML is transaction monitoring. Tailored insurance monitoring rules uncover frauds that hide behind the large block of premium payments, frequent policy alteration, early withdrawal, or beneficiary data inconsistency. So, to keep up with the times, many systems embed machine learning and behavioral analytics when unchecked cases are difficult to be handled via traditional rule-based systems, thus the production of false alarms reduces. In that way, the task of compliance teams' being able to invest the time solely in actual threats elevates greatly.
On the other hand, sanctions screening and watchlist monitoring are two other aspects which are extremely relevant to insurance companies that function across different regulatory zones or regions. Thus, AML compliance solutions have to be capable of screening customers, beneficiaries, and third parties regularly and in real-time against international sanctions lists, databases of politically exposed persons, and sources of adverse media. Ongoing screening conducted at all times provides an opportunity for compliance staff to be sure of their insurances even in such cases when customer's risk profile change over time.