Introduction
Combating financial crime requires a holistic and all-encompassing approach. To help achieve this, Cecabank has adopted SymphonyAI’s solution since 2017, subsequently establishing a 360-degree view covering the security of treasury, payment services, and securities, for financial institutions around the world.
Customer objectives
Cecabank is a Spanish wholesale bank specializing in securities services, treasury management, payments, and digital solutions. They offer customers innovative, tailored financial proposals and guide customers through projects to reach the customer’s business objectives.
Cecabank’s main objective was therefore to deploy a tailored solution that would cover transaction monitoring, sanctions filtering, and customer due diligence. Most solutions in the market only covered commercial banking at that time, but Cecabank was determined to achieve a level of customizability that would address wholesale as well as retail requirements.
Back in 2015, Cecabank embarked on its mission to find a next-generation, advanced, solution that would cover transaction monitoring, sanctions filtering, and due diligence of customers. Critically, such a solution had to be customizable, to meet both retail and wholesale banking requirements. SymphonyAI’s solution, subsequently adopted in 2017, has met this need: its anti-money laundering (AML), treasury management (TM), and watch list management (WLM) capabilities accounting for Transaction Screening; while its know your customer (KYC) function also bridges both wholesale and retail in addressing customer screening.
The results have allowed Cecabank to scale ahead of the wider industry, as Maria Jose Molina, Head of AML at Cecabank attests. “SymphonyAI has the ability to access information that is needed in a quick and efficient way, which has been very important to us over the past few years,” said Molina. “In 2012, we segregated our financial activities from the associative ones, we changed focus, now based in securities services, and we expanded to new services and customers. SymphonyAI has allowed us to do so in a fast and easy way since its deployment.”
Not only has Cecabank evolved at pace since 2012, but the new regulatory and supervisory landscape has also changed, further emphasizing the need for customizability and agility within the bank’s chosen solution. SymphonyAI’s screening module has helped to meet these new requirements. “When we started the project, we were worried about the efficiency not only of the solution but also about how much time our team would need to investigate each alert,” Molina said. We found it imperative that the analyst had all alerts integrated into one screen rather than three for a more efficient, effective approach. And we were really pleased with SymphonyAI’s ability to present the information in a usable format, to make our alert management a lot more efficient. Overall, SymphonyAI has enabled us to reduce the time and cost of investigations without sacrificing coverage.”
Overall, SymphonyAI has enabled us to reduce the time and cost of investigations without sacrificing coverage.”
Maria Jose Molina, Head of AML, Cecabank
Ongoing engagement with dedicated consultants at SymphonyAI means continuous development of its SymphonyAI setup. It also means the best is yet to come, as work continues together to maximize efficiencies and realize Cecabank’s future objectives and innovation goals.
We are looking forward to seeing what’s in store for new versions of SymphonyAI, ensuring we at least keep up with – but hopefully remain ahead of – other banks. With this in mind, we are already looking forward to implementing the latest version of SymphonyAI. SymphonyAI has also given us a platform to explore additional capabilities based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, which is a big aspiration going forward as part of our financial crime program.
Maria Jose Molina, Head of AML, Cecabank
