Background

ING Direct is part of ING (International Netherlands Group), which is one of the world’s largest financial services organisations. It operates across 60 countries and has over 115,000 employees. The UK operation was launched in May 2003.

In building its customer base, ING Direct recognised that compliance with money laundering regulations is business critical and wanted to make sure it took all necessary steps available to prevent it.

Compliance and fraud prevention

Experian had been providing anti-money laundering solutions to ING Direct in the UK since it launched in 2003 and a further five year contract was signed in 2005. Experian’s advanced anti-money laundering solutions are being used to detect and prevent potential money laundering activity and to comply with increased regulatory pressures to cut financial crime.

Experian Authentication Solutions use an electronic, risk-based approach to validate and verify customers. An individual’s biographical data, given at point of purchase, is compared against Experian’s authoritative data sources.

Each individual’s data is measured in three dimensions – the breadth, depth and quality. Experian looks at the number of electronic records it can be matched against, how far back in time they go and the processes that were in place when the records were created.

An authentication decision is then given to ING Direct in real-time, with no need for paper-based proofs, so they can decide whether or not to proceed with account applications.

Real-time anti-money laundering checks

Quinten Fraai, Sales & Operations Director from ING Direct commented, “ING is committed to having the most robust systems in place to ensure that we protect our business and our customers from the threat and impact of money laundering. As our account opening process takes place in a non face-to-face environment, the Experian solution provides online, real-time anti-money laundering checks, enabling us to make decisions in a secure, effective and accurate manner.

Experian has the most robust solution for anti-money laundering, making it the best choice for our business. With over 850,000 savings customers, Experian's anti-money laundering systems enable us to open accounts instantly and in a non-intrusive manner. It has played an important part in our customer satisfaction results.”