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Vinson Kurian

The package captures customer details, stores compliance rules, monitors transactions and flags any violation of transactions against customer profile and compliance rules.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, May 28

THE Mumbai-based banking and finance solutions provider InfraSoft Technologies has offered to co-operate with the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks Association (IBA) in setting up the anti-laundering framework.

According to Mr Hanuman Tripathi, Managing Director, the company is planning to hold a demo of its OMNIEnterprise anti-laundering package at the RBI. It has also asked for an audience with IBA to enable introduction of the package to the bank's chief executives.

Mr Tripathi told Business Line that the pressure on India for institutionalising such a framework had never been more evident with the US authorities having fined State Bank of India for violation of banking laws and failure to maintain accurate records. The fines resulted from the bank's apparent engagement "in unsafe and unsound practices related to its failure to establish and maintain procedures reasonably designed to assure and monitor compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act".

According to Mr Tripathi, InfraSoft `s anti-money laundering solution is equipped to provide comprehensive reporting and query capabilities. The package captures customer details, stores compliance rules, monitors transactions and flags any violation of transactions against customer profile and compliance rules. The system generates all statutory reports and provides for the generation of suspicious activity reports.

In India, co-operative banks, non-banking financial companies, chit funds and housing financial institutions have been brought under the ambit of the Prevention of Money Laundering Bill (PMLB) passed by Parliament. This is so because that there is "every reasonable ground to assume that NBFCs and chit funds, which are collecting huge amounts of money from the public, could provide a safe haven to money launderers".

The InfraSoft package supports the Know Your Customer (KYC) regime being implemented by RBI.

It keeps track of the pattern of remittances from the transactions executed by a customer through multiple channels and is equipped to pick a trend, if any. This helps the bank comply with accountability norm for reporting such transactions.

The package also alerts the bank against authorising remittances to the "negative list" of countries, destinations and types of accounts notified by the US Federal Government from time to time. In fact, it allows the bank to log on straight away to the updated negative list.

It will ask for the credentials of an unknown customer/beneficiary with whom a transaction is sought to be struck.

InfraSoft is in the process of building relevant requirements listed by the Canadian and Singapore governments into the package

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