The Client
A leading global asset management firm operating across multiple jurisdictions, this organization manages assets on behalf of institutional and retail clients and is subject to stringent AML, sanctions, and fraud screening obligations. With a large and diverse counterparty population spanning customers, employees, contractors, and vendors, maintaining consistent, audit-ready financial crime surveillance across the entire ecosystem was both a regulatory necessity and an operational challenge.
The Challenge
Despite operating a large and diverse counterparty population, the firm lacked a unified approach to financial crime surveillance, leaving critical gaps in coverage and creating material risk across investigators, regulators, and the business. The challenges ran from data quality at source through to the pace of regulatory response, compounding the compliance burden at every level.
- Fragmented Monitoring Controls: Financial crime surveillance relied on disconnected, manual processes with no unified view across the full counterparty population, customers, employees, contractors, and vendors were screened in silos or not at all.
- High False-Positive Rates: The volume of false positives overwhelmed investigators, diverting capacity from genuine suspicious-activity detection and slowing the overall compliance function.
- Inconsistent Data Quality: Data feeding the surveillance platform was poorly reconciled and inconsistent across source systems, undermining alert quality, investigation integrity, and audit trails.
- Growing Regulatory Expectations: Increasing regulatory requirements for AML, sanctions, and fraud screening across the business demanded a more robust, scalable, and auditable approach than the existing setup could support.
- Slow Investigations and Reporting: The absence of a unified case-management view made investigations and regulatory reporting slow and effort-intensive, increasing operational and compliance risk.
The Impact
- 360° Ecosystem coverage, every party screened.
- ~40% Fewer false positives.
- Daily Sanctions and PEP watchlist refresh.
The Solution
Hoonartek established a single financial crime platform capable of screening the entire counterparty ecosystem, customers, employees, contractors, and vendors, through one unified surveillance environment. Sanctions and PEP screening were brought to a daily watchlist refresh cycle, ensuring checks always run against current designations rather than stale data.
The Hoonartek team addressed data quality at source, profiling feeds and resolving issues directly in the originating systems before they reached the platform, eliminating the inconsistency that had previously undermined alert quality and audit trails. The team connected core systems of record to ensure screening ran on complete, up-to-date data throughout. Hoonartek executed delivery using the DevFac method with test automation, compressing each regression cycle so fixes reached production faster and kept pace with the rate of regulatory change.
Key Benefits
- Whole-Ecosystem Coverage: Every customer, employee, contractor, and vendor is now screened through a single platform, closing the surveillance gaps that previously existed across the counterparty population.
- Fewer False Positives: Approximately 40% reduction in false positives means investigators focus their capacity on genuine risk rather than alert noise.
- Always-Current Watchlists: Daily sanctions and PEP watchlist refresh ensures screening is always aligned to the latest regulatory designations.
- Trustworthy Data at Source: Quality fixed upstream in originating systems means the surveillance platform runs on clean, consistent feeds, improving alert integrity and audit trail reliability.
- Faster, Audit-Ready Delivery: DevFac test automation shortens each regression cycle, accelerating the pace at which fixes reach production and regulatory reports are substantiated.