Anti-money laundry and fraud prevention

In the Spotlight:

Leigh Ryland talks about Jade ThirdEye partnership

In this interview, Leigh Ryland, MMC’s Chief Risk Officer, provides insights into our partnership with Jade ThirdEye and how MMC is leveraging their technology to provide an advanced anti-money laundry service.

Tell us about the role technology plays in delivering MMC’s services

Our philosophy at MMC is to be service-driven, facilitated by our people and technology. Our clients outsource their operations and technology services to MMC, enabling them to focus on their core business, setting them free to accelerate their success. Our job is to clear the stuff that gets in their way of achieving the best for their investors.

We provide three main types of services, all of which technology plays a vital role:

1. Fund Administration services, including asset valuation, unit pricing, fund accounting and registry services. Our services also consist of trade matching, settlements, corporate actions, regulatory reporting requirements, and reconciliations.
2. Wealth Administration services, including portfolio reporting and custodial services. The MMC Wealth Administration service holds, administers, and reports on a wide range of local and offshore investments.
3. Fund Custody for safekeeping, trade instruction and matching, corporate actions and reconciliations. MMC also works with several sub-custodians.

We do not expect our clients to be technology experts; that is our role. So, with new countless technologies surfacing every year and the changing nature of the regulatory environment, we periodically review technology trends and available solutions, with a specific focus on what can deliver the most benefits to our clients. Our technology architecture leverages a wider ecosystem, meaning we use APIs to easily integrate with third-party specialist systems.

Another problem we address revolves around the possibility of our clients’ businesses being used by criminals as a vehicle for laundering money. Our clients are obliged to put in place people and processes to comply with New Zealand’s Anti-money Laundering Act. As these compliance processes are typically repetitive, technology can free up investment managers’ and advisers’ valuable time and capability to focus on accelerating their business success. To meet such compliance needs, we offer our clients Jade ThirdEye, an automated anti-money laundering SaaS product. Jade ThirdEye takes a huge burden off their backs, as no one wants to be party to the kinds of activity that can cause reputational damage, regulatory fines and cause so much harm in our society.

How does MMC’s partnership with Jade help you to carry out your core purpose?

Our partnership with the team at Jade ThirdEye is constantly evolving, dating back to 2013. As a leading firm in this domain, we have confidence in their dedication to pushing the boundaries by leveraging technology to deliver innovative solutions, which will benefit our clients.

Regulatory pressures and corporate compliance responsibilities are driving more firms to review their security infrastructure. To mitigate risks rising from potential human error, many of our larger clients opt to subscribe to Jade ThirdEye’s automated screening services for advanced anti-money laundering (AML). Jade offers an efficient way of screening whilst also providing clients with peace of mind that appropriate security checks and automated processes are in place for compliance checks.

Our integration with Jade ThirdEye offers a streamlined and secure process, with little manual intervention and no need for re-keying information or duplicating work. Diving into this a little deeper, MMC’s NeXus platform sends an FTP file to Jade ThirdEye, which integrates with Dow Jones to execute watchlist screening overnight. Depending on the service level agreement in place, MMC or their clients then log into Jade ThirdEye to view and action the alerts.

Moreover, Jade ThirdEye performs a 365-day screening of all investors, where a new screening process takes place on the annual anniversary of the onboarding process. This delivers automatic dynamic screening for regular checks that is executed in the background, enabling our clients to focus on their business.

In addition to the screening services, we also offer account monitoring services to our clients. Jade’s AML transaction monitoring capabilities enable our clients to apply complex sets of rules to their customer transactions, receive alerts and document their actions. Again, MMC’s services can be tailored to meet the individual needs of our clients.

Jade offers the ability to file suspicious activity reports directly with the FIU. This creates a seamless and easily audited screening and account monitoring process for our clients.

Understanding the main challenges of AML in the financial services sector and the role technology can play in addressing them

As the industry moves to a more digitalised, global playing field, regulators will increasingly demand more stringent controls and accountability to counter money laundering and financial crime. Digitalisation, including the growth of cryptocurrencies, puts pressure on processes and systems for onboarding new clients, trade executions, and downstream payments and settlements to perform real-time compliance checks throughout the transaction lifecycle.

Technology plays a vital part in ensuring compliance and reducing risks efficiently. As fund and wealth management firms grow, the resources required to scale become stretched, often resulting in manual errors. Systems such as Jade ThirdEye enable businesses to automate their processes and scale with confidence as transaction volumes and clients increase with no impact on resources or processes. These streamlined systems improve your accuracy too, due to the reduction in manual processes.

Jade ThirdEye evolves with use and can be customised to meet specific risk profiles. At MMC, we are excited that Jade ThirdEye is part of our strategic roadmap to further enhance our transaction monitoring and screening processes.

As Chief Risk Officer, Leigh Ryland leads the Risk & Oversight Team, driving and embedding the quality of MMC’s operational oversight. Leigh joined MMC in 2015 with 21 years of experience in the financial services industry, working in various management positions across the UK and New Zealand. Trained as an accountant, Leigh’s attention turned to fund accounting, unit pricing and investment reporting, before taking on a risk and compliance role at MMC.