Anqa AML RegTech platform designed for Financial Inclusion
… and to join the fight against financial crime.
Some of the world’s most corrupt acts; modern-day slavery, terrorism, human trafficking, the illegal wildlife trade, organ trafficking, and child sex exploitation are made possible by money laundering. Trillions of dollars finance these crimes — an estimated 2% to 5% of GDP per year, or USD$800 billion — $2 trillion.
Governments around the world are trying to address money laundering and more effort is being put into detecting laundered money and criminal organisations. As such, many countries now have strict AML regulations, and companies operating in financial services — more than 4 million around the world — often must fulfil a long list of obligations, spending tens of thousands to do so.
Currently, companies spend more than $180 billion per year to be compliant with regulation.
The Birth of Anqa AML
For more than 25 years, Daniel Rogers managed Global Trade and Transaction Banking relationships, and his clients were among the largest 200 multinational firms in the world. Across metals and mining, military hardware and software, fast moving consumer goods and financial institutions, Daniel witnessed how capital navigated the financial system and how tax havens, legal structures and multi-jurisdictions enabled bad actors to avoid tax, utilise child labour and fund many of the world’s most deplorable acts.
Driven by this knowledge, and an understanding of how companies struggle to detect fraud and comply with AML legislation, Daniel left the banking sector to do something about it.
Supporting Emerging Markets
While anti-money laundering is a reality across the globe, some markets are better equipped to keep up with compliance regulations in order to protect themselves than others.
Anqa AML has been designed with a focus on Financial Inclusion to support emerging economies of South East Asia, South Asia and North Africa, which are not only less mature in AML compliance but also have less available compliance expertise.
Our First Key Partnerships
Anqa AML partners with Transformation Professionals, a regional partner supporting the Pakistan and Middle Eastern markets. This partnership provides Anqa AML with access to regulators, fraud and risk management expertise and a full sales and service team in the region.
A case study in Pakistan.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) deemed Pakistan as non-cooperative in the global effort to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism, and in order to encourage the country to improve regulatory regimes and establish AML/CFT standards and norms, relegated it to the FATF member country Grey List. Pakistan has been working hard with FATF to comply with AML requirements and as of October 2022, has been removed from the grey list.
To operate in global markets and gain legitimacy in capital markets, as it wants to do, Pakistan’s financial records need to be auditable on a mass scale.
The Anqa AML + Transformation Professionals partnership in Pakistan bring together local expertise with best in class technology.
For many people across the world, access to financial services is simply out of reach.
This means that millions of people are excluded from receiving the financial products and services they need to build better lives for themselves. With our Electronic Onboarding solution, we’re making affordable electronic onboarding available to more financial institutions around the world.
At the same time, we’re helping protect against online sexual exploitation of children and financial crime without compromising on security.
On their heels
Criminals are always a step ahead and know how to exploit weaknesses in systems and processes. When considering the larger world of transnational organised crime it must be assumed they have significant resources and access to a sophisticated market of enterprising criminal software developers to develop technologies to protect their ‘operations’. Larger financial organisations and multinational firms are entering a Digital Arms Race to outsmart and outpace the other.
Smaller firms may fly under their radar for the moment but it won’t be long before technology will drive criminal behaviour, not just our response to their actions. Detecting their behaviours is near impossible without using technology to separate the needle from the haystack.
That’s what we’re here for.