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Due in part to a growing regulatory environment, nearly half of surveyed business executives around the world expect spending on anti-money laundering (AML) to increase for both staff and technology over the next couple of years, finds a new a new report from Aite Group.

The report finds that some financial institutions have to varying degrees been experimenting with integrating their fraud prevention and AML functions into cohesive financial crimes units. While this concept makes sense on the surface, institutions that have attempted this integration cite a number of challenges, including organisational and cultural barriers. Fraud prevention, therefore, ranks low on the list of features sought in an AML solution—well below the desire for robust analytics and rule sets, tuning flexibility, and case management.

“While there is no clear-cut answer regarding whether AML and fraud-prevention functions will increasingly merge over time, integration efforts that focus on sharing data between these groups appear to have the most momentum,” says Julie Conroy McNelley, senior analyst with Aite Group and co-author of this report. “To that end, vendors of enterprise risk management solutions should ensure that their solution has the flexibility to facilitate this sharing on an entitlements basis and reflects the unique needs and approach of financial institutions seeking to meld fraud prevention and AML.”

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