by Dina-Perla Portnaar
Apparently, in 2012 there was limited information available on money laundering schemes and there were not a lot of cases on the internet. To help the community, Abhishek Dwivedi started the portal and gathered information such as news, case studies and fines related to money laundering and the financing of terrorism across the world. As a company, the primary activity has been in consultancy services, helping banks in advising patterns and behaviors on how their products and services can be abused for money laundering and what kind of controls they should put in place. Though AMLabc as a portal started back in 2012, Regxsa as a rebranding of AMLabc occurred in 2020. We have had the opportunity to talk to CEO of Regxsa and to ask him some specific questions related to anti money laundering.
For what purpose was Regxsa founded?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “In addition, training and awareness was also part of the service. The purpose of Regxsa: as the name suggests, Regxsa aims at achieving and exceeding regulatory expectations. The initial target is helping financial institutions in doing the right thing by detecting and preventing money laundering and terrorism financing crimes. Going forward, we would like to expand in other regulatory space.”
Previously, the name was AMLabc. Why change the name?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “AMLabc has been a very well known name in the community where the emphasis has always revolved around money laundering detection and prevention. Going forward, we wanted to broaden the scope to cover other major regulatory themes. Hence, there was a need to represent the ambitions better. The main mission is to do the right thing, which is also represented in the new logo.”
What are Regxsa’s USP’s?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “The biggest USP is the on-ground experience across different financial institutions. The Regxsa team has done the work themselves and has seen all the ‘ups & downs’ in the real world and on the ground. They know the challenges faced by financial institutions and have helped in coming up with practical and implementable solutions. Knowing what is possible and what is not possible (from a financial institution’s perspective), Regxsa works on out of the box ideas and solutions, which work.”
Who is Regxsa’s target audience?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Financial institutions, including banks, payment service providers and money service businesses.”
What are the strengths of Alexis?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Regxsa covers some major aspects of money laundering prevention. Senior management doesn’t just get a sample to have an overview. Our approach makes senior management aware of the exposure to different known schemes across the world. Also, it helps them make right decisions, so that their financial institution is not the next one on news. They don’t have to bother about the technical details and so on to get an idea of what is going wrong. Top down guidance is very important in giving a direction where the financial institutions should be heading for fighting money laundering.
Alexis is best suited to help them in making firm decisions. In addition, we want to do the right thing. There are lots of technical solutions which do fancy things in finding anomalies in behavior. However, one key aspect is missed in the detection chain, namely investigators. They are the smart minds at any financial institution who makes decisions whether something is money laundering or not. Regxsa empowers the investigators by providing them a solution which can be sliced and diced based on different criteria, giving them flexibility to perform real investigations.”
Why is Alexis revolutionary?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “One of the major problems in the industry is that financial institutions don’t learn from each other’s mistakes. There are fines imposed, schemes are unearthed. However, before anything can be done, it’s already too late – sometimes more than six months to a year. A lot of time is wasted in governance, trying to make a remediation team, setting goals and so on. Criminals don’t have these limitations and grab any vulnerability they can get hold of. Crime has no boundaries. Also, criminals laundering funds do all they can to be one step ahead. Unlike banks, they are not bound by licenses, investment restrictions, balance sheets, shareholders or regulatory restrictions.
Alexis is revolutionary because it supports investigations in being smarter. It does not just look at rows of data provided to them. Regxsa wants to present them with different aspects of performing investigations, slice and dice as they like, go time-travelling and find it for them to make sure the behavior of the investigated party has indeed changed. The most important aspect is that they are informed whether the investigated party may or may not be showing similar behavior as other known schemes, i.e. learning from other’s mistakes.
If a financial institution is fined, it is quite likely others may be exposed to similar situations. Senior management would not want to be the next on news and hence, Alexis can provide them how they may or may not be exposed to such failures. Moreover, without running any long remediation programs, using just Alexis, they can time travel and find out if they may have been susceptible to such exposures or fines in the past as well. With Alexis, Regxsa wants to do the right thing!
The third aspect is helping financial institutions grow their business further. Alexis will present the exposure to risky areas, after which the financial institutions can ring-fence and expand their business in non-risky areas. Alexis is cloud based. This enables Regxsa to bring innovation and to leverage a lot of technologies which are hard to get within an organisation. Based on permission from clients, Regxsa shares best practices across clients.”
How does Regxsa want to be perceived?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Regxsa is a brand to rely on, does the right thing and is a trusted partner. Regxsa brings a lot of expertise from the area of ML/TF detection/prevention and wants clients to leverage that experience by using Alexis.”
What will remain the same over time in terms of Regxa’s identity?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Regxsa will keep on doing the right thing, no matter what is needed from a technological side of things and on the level of products and services. In terms of AML and current status quo: departments and teams within financial institutions that focus on AML want to do the right thing and want to do what is needed. The human factor continues to be the weakest link in AML detection. Yet, it is the human factor which can do research that is not matched by machines. The offering will enhance this human support. Central value and objective will remain: bring the ‘human factor’ back in the heart of the AML detection process.”
What is the key company value of Regxsa?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Regxsa believes in doing the right things and doing it right.”
Which top four messages are leading?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Human versus technology is an important one. Banks started to depend on technology. Yet, only the human eye can offer sufficient oversight and can ‘catch’ the unexpected. It is not the technology, but the architecture that defines how investigators will let technology work for them. The human factor will remain crucial. Also, Regxsa supports AML professional and is experienced based as people have actually worked on the ground. Regxsa allows massive cost savings as customers only pay for what they need. It is subscription based as it is a cloud solution.”
Why would customers want to buy from Regxsa?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Because of the following aspects: exposure to ML/TF fines and known scheme; the ability to create schemes and track regular exposure, help business in ring-fencing exposure of their product and customer base to ML/TF threats and explore the green areas. Regxsa is cloud based and hence much more flexible in bringing new technology and solutions to the market. The IT partner is an experienced company, namely Fortech, who translates the ideas into tangible solutions.”
What is the difference between departments Regxsa targets and business goals top down and within the organisation?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “Monitoring ML/TF is slowly moving towards the business side, where compliance is moving more towards advisory role. This is the case at several organisations already. Compliance department on the other hand will always be a good start, but they may already be overwhelmed. Regxsa reaches out to the CXO level and guides them through.”
If there is one thing Regxsa should be known for, what would that be?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “It would be the pragmatic approach for doing the right thing.”
If there is one thing Alexis should be known for, what would that be?
Abhishek Dwivedi : “It’s a known fact that criminals are a few steps ahead. For once, let’s complement human intelligence with Alexis and get ahead of them.”
PraveshKumar Reageren
I know u are the one who can do.🥰