As money launderers and other financial criminals become increasingly sophisticated, financial institutions must adapt to keep up with them or these criminals could destroy their businesses. To address this growing threat, these institutions must become more adept at identifying illegal behavior in an accurate and timely manner.

Mantas, the leading provider of compliance and risk management solutions, and Teradata have recently joined forces to provide financial firms with a powerful tool to accommodate the world’s most challenging compliance requirements and fight financial crime. Volumes of detailed information in the scalable Teradata data warehouse allow a solution like Mantas to look across an enterprise to identify all possible situations without performance bottlenecks.

Detecting financial crime requires more than a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Criminals not only constantly change their tactics, but they also use multiple methods to circumvent financial institutions’ controls. They may launder money through multiple accounts, take over accounts from unsuspecting victims or even use a firm’s own employees as accomplices. To combat these threats, a solution is needed that utilizes the right technology to sort through mass amounts of data and find suspect transactions. Using incorrect or inefficient technology can result in falsely identifying legal transactions as illegal, or worse, missing the illegal transaction altogether. A solution that includes a fully integrated, enterprise-wide data platform such as a Teradata Warehouse is a key advantage to combating financial crime.

Sophisticated solutions that address anti-money laundering (AML), broker compliance, trading compliance, fraud detection, operational risk analysis and client assurance are all offered on Mantas’s industry-leading Behavior Detection Platform. Couple this platform with the unlimited scalability and parallel performance of the Teradata Database in serving thousands of simultaneous users with ad-hoc or static queries and reports, and you have a winning partnership and a solution superior to the competition. With this combination, firms can achieve significant cost advantages by meeting numerous compliance requirements from a single, scalable and sophisticated technology platform. The reuse of the information in the Teradata Warehouse enables organizations to reap the value of strong business decisions to gain a powerful, multidimensional view of their enterprise.

Behavior detection requires data about transactions, customers, accounts, addresses and other pieces of information. Teradata provides the data warehouse to manage and quickly access this data for analysis—with no performance issues for even the largest volumes—while the Mantas Behavior Detection Platform reviews the hundreds, thousands, millions, or hundreds of millions of transactions that occur within a financial services institution. Each transaction a financial criminal makes provides a clue to his or her behavior. Mantas can analyze these transactions to uncover those which point to nefarious behavior. This process is critical in complying with regulations and addressing financial crime.

The following are the solutions provided by Mantas and Teradata:

Mantas Behavior Detection Platform enlarge

Mantas Anti-Money Laundering has become the “gold-standard” in AML solutions. It provides automated, comprehensive and consistent surveillance of accounts, customers and correspondents across all business lines identifying suspicious activities and possible money laundering. The key to a successful AML solution is the ability to view these patterns over the course of time. With the capability Teradata offers, unlimited volumes of detailed historical information are stored and delivered upon request—even simultaneously without performance issues or bottlenecks—to an unlimited numbers of users.

Mantas Broker Compliance monitors customer suitability, trading abuses and broker selling practices to identify problematic areas related to firm interaction with customers. It alerts analysts and investigators of found behaviors and provides a context of business data and historical information with which to streamline analysis and resolution. Quickly identifying this type of activity is key, and the Teradata Database’s parallel architecture is perfectly suited for these real-time demands.

Mantas Trading Compliance uses sophisticated pattern recognition techniques to monitor trading and market-making activities with respect to regulatory compliance and best execution. The solution provides trade-by-trade visibility into interactions between traders and other market participants to identify potentially problematic practices or inferior order handling. Again, the parallel architecture of the Teradata Database enables real-time demands to be met without sacrificing performance.

Mantas Fraud Detection is designed to find sophisticated criminals that other fraud detection systems miss. From the fraudster looking to circumvent current "border patrol" systems which profile behaviors at the point of sale, to bank personnel who steal customer’s financial information, Mantas Fraud Detection helps stop these criminals before lasting damage is done. The Teradata Database’s capability to simultaneously process volumes of data from across a global enterprise provides the advantage needed to mitigate fraud.

Mantas Operational Risk Analysis enables financial institutions to proactively monitor critical controls and processes based on actual data from their entire enterprise. This provides institutions with a better understanding of their operational risk on a daily basis, thereby reducing operational exposures. Teradata’s capability to house market and credit risk data for full aggregation enables institutions to determine the risks across the enterprise. By adding even more data, such as that from finance, Teradata Warehouse extends these capabilities to serve other strategic activities such as risk-adjusted performance measurement, capital allocation and more.

Mantas Client Assurance breaks through the barriers and provides financial institutions with a clear, holistic picture of each customer’s business. This solution enables institutions to identify cross-selling opportunities, refine pricing strategies and promote customer retention across asset classes. A business’s customer relationship management (CRM) process can be further enhanced through the Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM) solution.

Businesses are finding that these solutions not only help them meet their compliance requirements, but also help ensure customer satisfaction and protect brand reputation. Loss of reputation due to sophisticated crime can wreak havoc with a firm and cause lasting damage. By implementing the solutions mentioned above, financial firms are able to maintain their pristine reputations. Furthermore, following the Teradata notion of “store once, use many,” this data is valuable across an organization’s entire enterprise.

Mantas and Teradata complete the solution
The combination of these Mantas and Teradata solutions provides financial services firms with a powerful tool to meet the world’s most challenging compliance requirements and fight financial crime.

“Working in partnership, Mantas and Teradata will focus on enabling financial services executives to quickly and cost effectively manage current compliance requirements while establishing a flexible and scalable platform to rapidly and economically address future requirements,” says Jim Donovan, Teradata vice president of global industry solutions for financial services. “The Teradata enterprise data warehouse is the foundation which creates a single, authoritative data environment to ensure accuracy, consistency and auditability across the enterprise, delivering on the compliance requirements while establishing a dynamic data environment for more strategic leverage.”

Even the most technologically advanced solution, however, is nothing unless it is cost-effective, flexible, and stable—attributes for which Teradata is known. Worldwide, customers are utilizing the Teradata Warehouse to manage the vast stores of data needed to empower behavior detection analysis and meet the needs of financial services firms beyond that of operational risk or enterprise risk management.

“Many of our customers have integrated the Teradata Warehouse into their technology architectures,” says Stephen Epstein, vice president of product management at Mantas. “They are very excited about the prospect of running Mantas on Teradata, bringing their operating costs even lower and increasing performance and scalability.”

The key to meeting the complex and rapidly evolving requirements of compliance and risk management requirements is a solution that can scale, adapt and accurately address regulations. Mantas and Teradata offer solutions that can help financial institutions meet their compliance and risk management regulations and protect them from financial crime that can harm their reputation, business and customers. T

Barry Vasudevan is the product marketing manager at Mantas and can be reached at Barry.Vasudevan@mantas.com.

Candace Bocci is the enterprise risk management program director in Global Consulting Services at Teradata. She can be reached at Candace.Bocci@ncr.com.

Teradata Magazine-December 2006