CASE STUDY
Fexco Pacific fights financial crime 20x faster
An automated AML programme in action
Fexco Pacific is a leading provider of foreign exchange and money transfer services in New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and several other countries across the Pacific. With over 95 offices and 400 staff, Fexco Pacific provides money remittance as an agent of Western Union and foreign exchange through their No. 1 Currency retail stores and process over 2 million transactions a year. Jade ThirdEye has enabled Fexco Pacific to meet their AML compliance obligations and contribute their efforts in the fight against financial crime.
The Problem
How can Fexco Pacific monitor transactions faster?
In light of the ever-increasing regulation around 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 in their retail outlets across multiple jurisdictions every day.
Fexco Pacific attempted to meet its compliance responsibilities by monitoring transactions manually using Excel spreadsheets, which led to 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 Fexco Pacific operates in were stretched to capacity if not beyond.
Jane Quinn, the Operations Risk and Compliance Manager for Fexco Pacific Group, was deeply concerned the increasing volume of transactions was resulting in missing potential suspicious transactions.
“It took up to three weeks to process each report, line by line. This meant suspicious activity wasn’t identified in good time. It was taking a very long time to spot suspicious and unusual activity and flag it.”
The Solution
Changing from manual to automated transaction monitoring using Jade ThirdEye
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 in a timely manner, let alone raising an STR.”
After much consideration, Fexco Pacific concluded the best way to solve their problem was through an automated anti-money laundering solution that was equipped to handle the high volumes of money remittance transactions they processed, among other things. So they went to the market to review and compare the industry-leading products for fighting financial crime.
After an extensive selection process, they chose Jade ThirdEye. This intuitive software removed the time-consuming, manual process of detecting suspicious transactions and helped Jane and her team 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, Jade ThirdEye can create a ‘pseudo’ customer number that we can attach the data to, for reporting and monitoring,”
One of the main reasons for selecting Jade 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. Jade’s competitor products couldn’t 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 changed its Internet provider. This meant a change in IP address, so the Jade ThirdEye support desk jumped in to solve this quickly.
Jade ThirdEye, being a software as a service (SaaS) solution, made it easy to deploy to nine countries. Fexco Pacific staff in each country could access the system without needing to set up Jade ThirdEye in each country. All they needed was a browser.
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The Benefits
Agility, efficiency, transparency
Fexco Pacific rolled Jade ThirdEye out incrementally across the remittance side of their business, starting with New Zealand, and followed by each of the other eight countries.
Jane explained that they initially had a standard set of transaction monitoring rules in place. But this didn’t work for each country, which had their own unique regulations and requirements.
“ Jade 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 Jade ThirdEye and run the rules in draft mode before these 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.”
Because of these features in Jade 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, getting rid of the three-week delay that used to exist - that’s twenty times faster.
The Future
A long term, flexible partnership
Fexco Pacific have found a partner in Jade for monitoring transactions and flagging suspicious activity. Jane often comments how well Jade ThirdEye helps Fexco Pacific carry out its AML compliance obligations, and see it being a core aspect of their business moving forward.
She particularly likes being able to customise the alerts themselves. And they also enjoy that Jade ThirdEye can accommodate the absence of customer numbers, plus being able to process rules in draft before pushing them live.
From a more holistic point of view, Fexco Pacific also likes the fact that Jade is an evolving company that is constantly developing and upgrading its solutions.
It’s good knowing that it’s not going to stagnate and that Jade is continually developing its offerings. We also like how they’re very open to taking our feedback on board to improve Jade ThirdEye.”
Ready to comply with confidence?
Talk to our team today to learn how you can optimise your AML compliance process, monitor transactions for suspicious activity, and identify high-risk customers and customise rules to match your risk profile.
