The regulatory compliance world can be very complex, and with the rapid expansion of digital payments, it’s increasingly difficult to identify and stop fraudulent transactions from occurring.

Technological solutions continue to evolve at an equally breakneck speed. But they have failed to keep up with the rapid-fire payments made by bad actors. This forces compliance analysts to manage the barrage with outdated and inefficient tools.

Euronet’s Skylight is a financial transaction monitoring solution that identifies fraudulent and suspicious activity behavior and aims to facilitate financial services compliance investigations by automating the entire process — mitigating both regulatory and reputational risk for businesses.

“Businesses have a lake of data they need to analyze,” said Bryan Zingg, President of epay North America at Euronet. “The system uses powerful algorithms to apply rules to that data and then it creates automated alerts. So, when a compliance agent logs onto Skylight, they’re able to see different alerts. The alerts have been created based on the rules businesses set.”

In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Zingg and Brian Riley, Director of Credit at Mercator Advisory Group, discussed how solutions like Skylight can greatly benefit businesses and help them streamline an otherwise difficult process.

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Bringing Clarity to Regulatory Compliance Cases

Efficiency is key for an effective regulatory compliance solution. And it helps liberate time for AML/Compliance analysts to focus their efforts on spotting illicit consumer behaviors. Skylight creates a case management workflow for compliance analysts. How this plays out is that companies can modify their specific workflows. These can be based on the stringency of their compliance obligations. Workflows can be straightforward or more complex depending on the needs of the business.

“Once the analyst has gone through the case and determined that it generated a meaningful alert that needs to be flagged as a compliance risk, the system can automate and populate the SAR [suspicious activity report] and CTR [currency transaction report], which are two different types of forms that a business will have to file with their regulator,” said Zingg. “Through an integration that we have with FinCEN — Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — an automated process sends th...