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Fighting financial crime together

We use technology to protect our customers’ assets while delivering outstanding service.

Commitment to society
Financial industry in its fight against terrorists, human trafficking and oppressive regimes block access to funds and banking channels to sanctioned individuals and entities. Barclays Financial Crime Operations team is the first line of defence responsible for preventing sanctioned individuals and entities to utilise its’ services, block payments and detect money-laundering activities. One of the activities undertaken by the team is to screen customer names against sanctioned individuals.

Challenges
Each day the team screens thousands of alerts that are generated by the screening application. Majority of the alerts are false and probability of tracing a true alert is even more difficult. False matches are not just Barclays but an industry wide problem. The Operations team investigates these alerts through a process which is manual and consumes significant number of resources.
At Barclays we are continuously working on making the detection process efficient that helps to bring better quality alerts for investigation and reduce poor quality alerts through refining our screening capabilities.

Solution
Recently, the Operations and Technology team jointly explored the feasibility of introducing new set of rules that can be added to the screening platform that had the potential to increase elimination of false alerts to 70%. The team analysed large set of data, tested multiple scenarios and engaged Financial Crime (policy) team, to ensure all risks are mitigated. Through collective effort, collaboration and working through agility the change in application was completed in a short period of six months.

Benefit 
Post introduction of the change there has been a drop of c70% alerts that are being presented for manual investigation. Drop in the alerts has helped business to not only focus on investigation of high risk alerts but also allowed to create capacity generated due to efficiencies.
The benefit case is now being scaled up and different regions are being engaged to expand the best practice.
This success story is a brilliant example of collaborative working between Operations and Technology. A great testimony of winning together as one Barclays.