The integrated IT solution designed to automate and streamline the monitoring processes of money laundering risks and the transparency of ownership of supervised banks is at the final implementation stage and will be launched by the end of this year. The state-of-the-art system that will be managed by the National Bank of Moldova (NBM) is implemented with the assistance of the Financial Sector Transparency Activity (FSTA) that is funded by USAID, IPN reports.

At the beginning of this month, the future users of the solution started to be trained to manage it efficiently. One of the training sessions involved NBM vice governor in charge of this area Vladimir Munteanu and USAID FSTA Director Matthew Macellaro. “Given the current tendencies to digitize the functions to supervise the financial system at international level, the National Bank of Moldova set the goal of strengthening its supervision capacities by implementing information technologies,” stated Vladimir Munteanu.

Matthew Macellaro noted that the implementation of this innovatory solution was a real challenge given the enormous volume of operations that is to be supervised and, respectively, the complexity of the functionalities that were and will be yet developed. “FSTA will further support these efforts and we are confident that this solution will significantly contribute to diminishing the money laundering risks and other illegal activities,” stated the project director.

The new IT system will provide NBM employees with a series of advanced functionalities. The software will enable to supervise all banking operations as it will function as a single point of access and visualization of the information contained in numerous databases. At the same time, the concept of operation based on risk analysis will make it possible to detect suspicious activities and issue alerts. This will facilitate both the early identification of money laundering and terrorist financing risks and the detection of suspicious changes in the ownership structure of banks.

The USAID FSTA support also includes the strengthening of the national regime for preventing and combating money laundering and terrorism financing and organization of training programs for the regulatory authorities and reporting entities, moderated by international experts. The experts of USAID FSTA helped to work out different internal procedures, regulations and bills to amend the legislation on AML/CFT.