Are financial crimes costing your business serious money?

In a world first, Australian compliance ingenuity and technology enables businesses to rapidly and affordable audit and assess their risk exposure to financial crimes and then deliver actionable recommendations to undertake measures to eradicate these risks, minimising potential losses.

Every single day, major financial crimes, such as bribery, fraud, money laundering and tax evasion are committed costing businesses of all sizes billions of dollars per annum reaching unprecedented levels.

At the same time the threat of terrorist attacks at home and abroad is escalating forcing Governments to act requiring financial services companies to deploy transaction monitoring and surveillance solutions to identify and report the flow of funds to terrorist groups. Higher regulation and ethical standards are now expected of companies globally. The net result companies, large and small, are obligated to comply with local and foreign laws ranging from Anti-Money Laundering to Countering the Financing of Terrorism.

This is a new and significant challenge for companies where the consequences of non-compliance are staggering, for example, financial services companies globally have paid out over $261bn1 in fines in the last 7 years to regulatory authorities in many cases leaving hard-earned reputations in tatters. This of course does not include the losses organisations are incurring when they are themselves a victim of a financial crime.

In light of the changing landscape worldwide Arctic Intelligence, a Sydney based start-up, was founded with the mission to build affordable, easy-to-use online products for businesses to rapidly assess their exposure to financial crimes and put measures in place to mitigate risk exposure and to ensure regulatory requirements are met. Online financial crime training and expert consulting services, compliment the online risk assessment and health check solutions when required.

The founders understood that even for those who could afford it, understanding your financial crime risk and how to mitigate it was overly cumbersome, expensive and many available solutions were not effective and difficult to implement. So after combining over 100 years of hands-on, practical experience our experts have developed
practical end-to-end solutions for conducting risk assessments and compliance assurance monitoring. The tools provide a framework for identifying, assessing, mitigating and managing risk. Critically the tools provide tangible and actionable recommendations based on your company input to the tools.

The tools are easy to use. Designed for different industries and company sizes each tool asks a series of expertly designed questions to assess the situation. The company responses are then analysed to deliver practical recommendations to mitigate the risk or ensure compliance with industry regulations. A series of online training courses have been carefully designed to compliment the tools. At the same time should the organisation identify the need for further assistance, face-to-face training and consulting are also made available.

The online risk assessment tools contain hundreds of risk factors, specifically tailored to over 40 industry sectors, which are risk weighted to different levels. They assess inherent and residual risks leading to a carefully constructed, visually intuitive and comprehensive report that highlights the areas of concern providing practical recommendations. Companies can implement the recommendations and ensure scarce resources are targeted at the high-risk areas.

Online Health Checks have been cleverly designed to assist organisations in assessing compliance against specific legal obligations. When shortfalls are identified a real-time dashboard report proactively tracks issues, actions and compliance risk exposure on a day-to-day basis. The first of the online health check tools is the AML/CFT Health Check, the world’s first dedicated software-asa-service tool for performing compliance assurance monitoring.

Arctic Intelligence is already working with partners like Deloitte and the Governance, Risk and Compliance Institute (GRCI) and other leaders in the GRC field.

Anthony Quinn, Founder and CEO of Arctic Intelligence commented:

“Financial crime prevention is a global issue, receiving attention at the highest levels of Government in response to unprecedented levels of fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and terrorism financing – regulated or not, businesses must act.

There is now a perfect storm, financial crimes are costing economies billions of dollars annually, governments face international pressure to protect society from these risks and consequently rely on regulatory bodies to enforce compliance with a rapidly changing and increasingly complex set of compliance regulations. These regulations are growing and also applying to ever increasing numbers of organisations, with for example, the expansion of AML/CFT laws to ‘gatekeepers’ that traditionally have not needed to understand this area. Added to this is a trend towards personal accountability for compliance failures, which could have a direct impact on Boards and Executive Leaders, in fines, imprisonment or both.

Consequently, we are seeing demand for easy-to-use solutions that simply and demystify what can be a complex challenge for most organisations, particularly, small to medium sized organisations that simply do not have the luxury of dedicated compliance resources, nor the deep pockets required to hire major consulting firms and are looking for tools that help them reduce risk and meet compliance obligations in a self-directed manner.

Arctic Intelligence provides businesses and employees tasked with compliance, peace of mind, and critically reduces the organisations exposure to financial crimes. At the same time it reduces the costs of risk assessment and compliance monitoring dramatically.”

Arctic Intelligence was founded by an experienced team who have spent years leading risk and compliance programs for blue chip organisations, as well as in product development digital marketing, and tech start-ups. Our team includes financial crime subject matter experts that are accredited AML/CFT auditors and faculty members for the Diploma in AML/CFT and who are regularly publish articles in the GRC trade press. Team members have worked for companies like Macquarie Bank, Westpac, National Australia Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, ING, Thomson Reuters, BAE Systems and Accenture.

Given the highly scalable nature of the automated Arctic Intelligence products and the fact that the issues Arctic Intelligence looks to address are global ones, there is great opportunity to take Arctic Intelligence into international markets as well.

For further information contact:
e: [email protected]
p: +61 (02) 8001 6433
www.arctic-intelligence.com

Original Link: https://arctic-intelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/AI-Launch-011116.pdf