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Introduction
Northern Rock is currently the 9th largest UK quoted bank (by market capitalisation), the largest financial institution based in the North East of England and one of the most cost efficient UK mortgage lenders based on key performance ratios. It is a member of the FTSE 100 Top UK Companies and currently employs over 5000 people.
The Problem
With the imminent commencement of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, investment banks, brokers, Building Societies, insurers, solicitors - indeed any business that is regulated directly or indirectly by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) - will need to show demonstrable compliance of their money laundering training to its staff.
The FSA has the power to close any business that is not taking it's Money Laundering responsibilities seriously. Within Northern Rock, this has meant that over 5000 staff have to go through a money laundering training exercise every two years. This is not only very costly, but an administration nightmare.
The Solution
We developed a cartoon based flash Presentation that was designed to help satisfy the company’s anti-money laundering training requirements. It presents anti-money laundering prevention in an interesting and fun manner, ensuring that all employees fully understand the key issues and their obligations very clearly.
The presentation covers all aspects of money laundering (listed below) including the respective roles of the employee, employer, MLRO, JMLSG, FSA and FATF.
| Key Features |
| What is money laundering? |
| Stages of money laundering |
| The law |
| Company responsibilities |
| How the regulations affect northern rock |
| Our duty of confidentiality |
| How the regulations affect you |
| Examples of how criminals launder money |
| Suspicious transactions |
| Money laundering using bank or building society accounts |
| Money laundering using investment related transactions |
| Money laundering by offshore international activity |
| Money laundering involving financial institution employees and agents |
| Money laundering by secured and unsecured lending |
| Recognising and reporting suspicious transactions |
| How the regulations affect northern rock |
| Money laundering offences and defences |
| Prevention of money laundering |
| Identification procedures |
| Record keeping |
| Opening accounts |
| Verify current permanent address |
The presentation is supported by an Intranet based exam application (X-Exam) that ensures your employees have fully understood the issues through a multiple-choice test. The application automatically informs your employees (via email) when they need to take the test and allows you to monitors their results.
| It also offers the following features |
| Full integration with Orchidnet, building on a common interface, user database and security infrastructure. |
| The ability for a training administrator to create as many exam questions as necessary, these would then be added to a “question bank” and randomly selected when compiling an exam. |
| Employees can complete exams in batches; every exam would have a different set of questions for each employee. |
| The Training Administrator could view, print, and compare exam scores using a history log. All employees who have not set an exam could automatically be prompted to do so via email. |
| The Training Administrator can determine how many times students are allowed to re-take an exam and how soon they can re-take it. |
| Once employees have taken the exam, the system could calculate the score immediately and inform their immediate manager of their strengths and weaknesses. |
| A time period could be set on the exam, so that the Intranet automatically informs the employee when an exam needs to be re-taken. (i.e. Money Laundering every two years) |
Return on Investment
Northern Rock estimates that this solution will reduce their administration of money laundering compliance by 95% |
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“Orchid Software have been easy to do business with. We are delighted with the relationship we have with them”
Graham Crosby, Assistant IT Director, Northern Rock plc |
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“Orchid Software have been easy to do business with.”
Graham Crosby, Assistant IT Director, Northern Rock plc |
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