Kiwi-founded anti-money laundering company Avid AML has partnered with a consulting firm, Transformation Professionals, to lead the fight against transactional crime in one of the world’s most challenging markets - Pakistan.
Transformation Professionals operates in risk management, board and governance consulting and training across the South Asia and Middle East region and will provide Avid AML with access to Pakistan’s National Identification documents as well as country specific Pakistani watchlist databases – the data required to build customer insights. Avid AML will provide the technology needed to use these insights to build a greater picture of customers for Pakistani businesses for risk detection.
Shomail Naqvi, CEO and founder of Transformation Professionals, says “Avid AML and Transformation Professionals have been collaborating over the past 18 months to bring to market in Pakistan and the Middle East an anti-money laundering software solution suitable for our markets.
“Together, Transformation Professionals and Avid AML have been able to overcome the complexity of data sovereignty, access to reliable data sources with professional expertise to guide customers through risk management and digital transformation.”
Other global vendors focus on mature economies like Europe, Asia finance hubs or the North American market, with cost of supply and service prohibitive for emerging markets like Pakistan. The partnership between Transformation Professionals places Avid AML in a position to assist the country’s Government in its goal to help local businesses better comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.
Daniel Rogers, co-founder of Avid AML says Pakistan has been on the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “grey list” on and off since 2008. “Being on the FATF grey list creates uncertainty and limits international funding, investment and access to global capital markets, leading to an underdeveloped economy and persisting poverty that is reliant on the black market. In response, the Government of Pakistan has been working to enhance its AML and Countering of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) regulations, and compliance with those regulations.”
Each country faces its own unique challenges in the fight against transnational crime and money laundering however Pakistan is arguably more complex.
Pakistan’s informal economy and use of ‘Hawala,’ an alternate remittance network based on trust and reputation, its geographical position at the gateway of the Golden Crescent, one of Asia’s two principal areas for illicit opium production, and porous borders with Iran, China and Afghanistan all enable the movement of vast sums of physical cash undetected, contributing to problems like terrorist financing, drug trafficking and kidnapping for ransom.
“The amount of cash moved across Pakistan’s borders is unusually high by international standards. Hundreds of millions of Pakistani rupees can be moved at any given time. This is referred to as “black money” and can go unchecked without networks in place.
Rogers concludes, “There are a limited number of technology providers that bring Risk Profiling, Fraud Detection and Know Your Customer (KYC) view to provide a whole customer view. In collaboration with Transformation Professionals, Avid AML is in a position to provide the technology needed to help the Government drive change in Pakistan and move away from less regulated systems like the Hawala network towards transparency and good governance.”
