How can Fexco Pacific monitor transactions faster?

In light of the ever-increasing regulations surrounding anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-financing of terrorism (CFT), businesses are facing considerable governance and operational pressures to combat financial crime. These regulatory matters are compounded for Fexco Pacific, thanks to the large volume of financial transactions they process daily in their retail outlets across multiple jurisdictions.

Fexco Pacific attempted to meet its compliance responsibilities by manually monitoring transactions using Excel spreadsheets, which resulted in slow turnaround times for processing and investigating suspicious activity. Unfortunately, this situation wasn’t unique to just one of Fexco’s locations; all their offices throughout the Pacific Islands were grappling with the same issue. As a result, the compliance officers in each of the nine countries in which Fexco Pacific operates were stretched to capacity, if not beyond.

Jane Quinn, the Operations Risk and Compliance Manager for Fexco Pacific Group, was deeply concerned that the increasing volume of transactions was resulting in a higher number of missed potential suspicious transactions.

“It took up to three weeks to process each report, line by line. This meant that suspicious activity wasn’t identified in a timely manner. It was taking a very long time to spot suspicious and unusual activity and flag it.”
Jane Quinn, Operations Risk and Compliance Manager, Fexco Pacific Group

To monitor transactions effectively, suspicious transaction reports (STR) must be raised within a few working days of a suspicious transaction being identified.

“We hadn’t even got to the stage of identifying suspicious transactions on time, let alone raising an STR.” 

After much consideration, Fexco Pacific concluded that the best way to solve their problem was through an automated anti-money laundering solution equipped to handle the high volumes of money remittance transactions they processed, among other things. They went to the market to review and compare the industry-leading products for combating financial crime. 

After an extensive selection process, they chose ThirdEye. This intuitive software eliminated the time-consuming, manual process of detecting suspicious transactions, enabling Jane and her team to meet their AML and CFT compliance obligations. It also had the scale and flexibility that set them up to manage increasing volumes of transactions for their expanding business.

“We needed a product that could accommodate the absence of a customer number, but still connect the dots if there was a pattern of behaviour. If, for example, a customer comes in twice this week and twice the following week, ThirdEye can create a ‘pseudo’ customer number that we can attach the data to, for reporting and monitoring.”
Jane Quinn, Operations Risk and Compliance Manager, Fexco Pacific Group

One of the main reasons for selecting ThirdEye was its ability to handle Fexco Pacific’s data. Because the company is transactional, rather than customer-based, they don’t have account numbers to store transactions against. ThirdEye’s competitor products were unable to solve this business challenge.

In fact, two members of Jade’s account management team were on hand for the initial rollout and training, which went very smoothly. The local support desk helped during the bedding-in phase, which encountered the usual teething problems of logins, passwords, and authentication.

“Having the support team to call on was fantastic – they offer a great service,” said Jane.

An example of this was when the support helped Fexco Pacific’s Fiji office change its internet provider. This meant a change in IP address, so the ThirdEye support desk jumped in to resolve the issue quickly.

ThirdEye, being a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, made it easy to deploy in nine countries. Fexco Pacific staff in each country could access the system without needing to set up ThirdEye in each country. All they needed was a browser.

Agility, efficiency, transparency

Fexco Pacific rolled out ThirdEye incrementally across the remittance side of their business, starting with New Zealand and then following with each of the other eight countries.

Jane explained that they initially had a standard set of transaction monitoring rules in place. However, this approach didn’t work for every country, which had its own unique regulations and requirements: “ThirdEye lets us tweak the rules to fit each country’s legislation and currency thresholds.”

Jane and her team appreciate how they can upload initial data into ThirdEye and run the rules in draft mode before they go live. They find this extremely helpful, as it helps them minimise false positives. “Clearing the alerts is a big effort, but it’s good to be able to do this properly, as we are creating a history and pattern of customer activity”, said Jane.

Because of these features in ThirdEye, Fexco Pacific’s compliance team is now up to date and able to review alerts within 24 hours of these being raised. They can now clear the alerts promptly, eliminating the three-week delay that previously existed – that’s twenty times faster.

A long-term, flexible partnership

Fexco Pacific has found a partner in ThirdEye for monitoring transactions and flagging suspicious activity. Jane often comments on how well ThirdEye helps Fexco Pacific carry out its AML compliance obligations and sees it as a core aspect of their business moving forward.

She particularly likes being able to customise the alerts themselves. They also enjoy that ThirdEye can accommodate the absence of customer numbers, as well as being able to process rules in draft before pushing them live.

From a more holistic perspective, Fexco Pacific also appreciates the fact that ThirdEye is an evolving company that continually develops and upgrades its solutions: “It’s good knowing that it’s not going to stagnate and that they are continually developing their offerings. We also like how they’re very open to taking our feedback on board to improve the product”