Waters Rankings 2015: Best AML Compliance Solution Provider ─ NICE Actimize

The implications for financial institutions is that it has become more crucial than ever to have a firm grasp on what's going on outside of the business when it comes to AML compliance. The implications for those firms that don't comply-gargantuan fines, reputational damage, and the threat of sanctions-are more real than ever.

Between corporate money-laundering, rogue states and terrorist financing, the time of compliance through box-ticking is over. Modern AML compliance has to be agile, globally minded, and, crucially, end-to-end. As a result, financial institutions must look beyond their internal customer risk perspective.

It is this external monitoring element where NICE Actimize has prioritized its investment, resulting in what it calls the only "end-to-end enterprise-level AML solution in the market," a factor that played a significant role in landing the New York-based vendor the win in this category this year.

Utilizing a modular approach on a core platform, the AML suite comprises transaction monitoring software incorporating analytics capabilities paired with a new Customer Due Diligence (CDD) suite, sandwiched between the Risk Case Manager, alerting the user to possible issues, and the Unified Data Management layers. Integration with third-party systems extends the suite's issue investigation and remediation capabilities. The CDD suite is where the outward-looking element comes to the fore, allowing for external data and news events to be fed into the system, expanding its money-laundering typologies and analytics.

While AML has historically focused on the Western finance markets, Asia and the rest of the world have made significant strides to catch up. NICE Actimize has also invested in expanding its geographical reach by incorporating more language sets and location-based data that extends the core functionality of activity monitoring, model risk management, regulatory compliance, and currency transaction report processing.
AML has moved beyond a regulatory responsibility toward proactive management of risk and compliance. In an arena where incremental details can be a make-or-break differentiator, NICE Actimize stands out from the crowd by providing holistic, end-to-end tools, enabling financial institutions to not only comply with AML regulation, but to improve business processes as well.