Delivering scalable, secure transaction screening for inter-bank transfers on AWS
A leading financial services organisation partnered with Kainos to tackle the challenges that banks face with screening global transactions. These challenges include screening high volumes of transactions, whilst meeting compliance requirements and minimising operational costs and delays involved in manually resolving high rates of false positives.
Kainos was selected to deliver a scalable and secure transaction screening platform for these international inter-bank transfers built on a SaaS platform hosted on AWS. The solution includes robust sanction list management, automated alert dispositioning, and advanced analytics. It enhances compliance and customer experience by performing real-time watchlist screening, significantly reducing false positives and manual investigation efforts. It went live in September 2024, validated by customers and regulators, and benefiting from Kainos' comprehensive security by design and data assurance frameworks.
Modernising inefficient, traditional, screening processes
More than 40 billion cross-border transactions are screened for compliance each year, often multiple times to meet different regulatory requirements across the jurisdictions through which money flows. Previous solutions offered a fragmented and inefficient approach to these cross-border transactions. They were often screened multiple times - by the sending bank, intermediary, and the receiving bank - causing delays, unnecessary alerts, and inconsistent results.
Moreover, around 99% of flagged transactions typically turn out to be false alarms. This creates additional workloads for compliance teams and frustrates customers as a result of the delays. Without shared platforms or common rules, financial institutions often duplicate efforts and struggle to keep up with evolving sanctions rules.
Designing rapid, accurate and compliant outcomes
Kainos was selected as the technology partner to deliver a unified platform that significantly reduces the screening and analysis burden from the banks. We collaborated closely to co-create the solution based on an AWS-hosted service with secure connectivity. This has enabled our founding customer to partner with leading global financial institutions and trusted industry partners to deliver state of the art, real time watchlist screening using the most advanced technology solutions for list management, alert generation and disposition. As well as promoting excellence in compliance, the sanctions screening solution significantly removes the friction in the customer experience, whilst reducing the information that needs to be shared on individuals.
The solution includes two foundational components:
- Advanced Data Platform - integration of data, automation and platform capabilities using ML tools to deliver sophisticated watchlist management and enriched sanctions data to improve accuracy, cut down false positives, and speed up decision-making.
- Cloud-native, unified utility – the provision of a centralised service built in the cloud and accessible via a single API where banks can screen transactions just once, streamlining the process for everyone. It also allows for the rapid onboarding of new banks to accelerate their time to value.
The solution approach was to use best-in-class capabilities and integrate them together to form an end-to-end engine for processing screening requests at scale and pace. Kainos built the platform and integrated all the components into a single service based on AWS technologies including:
- Multi-account architecture via AWS Control Tower
- Microservices hosted in EKS and EC2 supporting the screening engines and APIs
- Hybrid serverless workflows using Lambda
- GitHub actions to develop CI/CD pipelines with Terraform IaC language.
- AWS Transfer Family for secure file transfer services
- Multi-region support enabling data sovereignty
- Comprehensive security and data assurance supported by ClamAV, SentinelOne, Macie, Kroll, Shield and AWS WAF.
- DevSecOps tooling estate (SonarQube, Nexus IQ, Nexus repository, Prisma, AWS Secure landing zone accelerator)
We collaborated closely with our customer to design, build and test the first version of the Screening Platform including the underlying AWS infrastructure and all the data, integration and orchestration services that bring together the key alert components:
- Alert Generation – Neterium Jetflow generates screening alerts on transactions that are deemed as potentially involving sanctioned individuals or organisations
- Alert Disposition – SilentEight Iris ensures that alerts generated by Jetflow are not false positives (one of the biggest challenges with most existing screening solutions used by banks).
- Alert Investigation – an Appian-based web interface is used to manage the investigation workflow for screening matches.
The organisation now has a foundational and extensible AWS platform backed by an assured technology stack, validated by regulators. The solution provides the following benefits:
- Industry exemplar – banks benefit from a set of leveraged centralised standards, from 35 of the world’s leading financial institutions, which offer best practice, real time data and improved efficiency for banks and regulators globally. Increased security and compliance of screening has also been recognized as a significant benefit within this regulated industry.
- Reshape business processes – reduce time and transform the manual effort involved in the management, collating, updating and checking of lists.
- Improve customer experience – significantly reduce the number of false-positive screening alerts, reducing the need for costly manual alert investigation and avoid unnecessary delay to legitimate transactions.