Waters Rankings 2020: Best AML Compliance Solution Provider—NICE Actimize

This year, NICE Actimize takes the top spot in anti-money laundering/know-your-customer (AML/KYC) category.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, NICE Actimize rolled out KYC Xpress, and additions and enhancements were made to its consolidated Anti-Money Laundering platform, which includes direct integration to identify trade-based money laundering, and money laundering through cryptocurrencies. 

Stephen Taylor, general manager for anti-money laundering at NICE Actimize, says the questions and concerns he received from clients during the pandemic mainly focused on speeding up KYC processes. He says this boils down to a combination of loan applications and remote working slowing down manual processes that were not fast to begin with.

“We were able to quickly focus our efforts to launch KYC Xpress. It is a cloud-based software-as-a-service solution that automates KYC procedures and increases the speed of KYC processes by more than 80%,” he says.

KYC Xpress searches across a variety of data sources such as media, politically exposed person (PEP) status, and public documents. The platform also creates an audit report that is time-stamped for proof of compliance.

Over the last 12 months, additions and developments made to the company’s consolidated Anti-Money Laundering Platform include an enhanced ability to identify trade-based money laundering, and money laundering through cryptocurrencies.

“We’ll continue to enhance our AML offering in a number of ways, putting the most focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and AML automation accelerators,” Taylor says. The company plans to expand existing automation technologies with unsupervised machine learning to find automation opportunities within alert triage and case management processes.

As well as continuing to expand geographically into the wider Asia-Pacific region—particularly Japan—Taylor says there is a strong opportunity for NICE Actimize to move into the commercial real-estate market because of industry problems the company has picked up on in managing AML issues.