Control and regulation of data in a bank

At Rabobank’s Regulatory Compliance Department, our role is based on finding suspicious patterns in transactions and customer behavior. We apply and study multiple systems for fraud detection, money laundering detection and all kinds of integrity problems involving financial or security aspects. bank reputation. Basically, what is applied is innovation. Some research is also carried out jointly with universities, specifically with doctoral candidates who help with what is known “Know Your Client” (KYC). With KYC, you learn about the transactions, the camouflaged, non-obvious information, what the recurring patterns are, what customers do to comply with some regulatory obligations, but it also serves to improve our society as a whole.

The main challenges that a European bank like Rabobank faces on a daily basis with respect to the enormous amount of data that its customers share, is finding relevant information. The challenge of dealing with 10 million daily transactions ranging from transactions with Credit and debit cards to electronic transfers, it is not an easy job, especially when dealing with millions of customers

The bank has a real time monitoring system that processes each transaction and makes a decision about it and, furthermore, we work on this aspect internally. On the other hand, we have different levels to observe different scenarios of clients, from observing their individual or group behavior and also how they relate to other people. In both scenarios, the main challenge we face is always the quality of the data. Do we have all the data? Is the data correct? When people are responsible for completing forms, errors are inevitably incurred, which requires constant vigilance to ensure data quality, especially when a large volume of records is processed.

The bank has a real-time monitoring system that processes each transaction

There are about 15,000 employees who, in one way or another, participate in the process of finding the intrinsic value of the data. A bank is a large-volume organization and this requires working with multiple layers of data. We have hundreds of people working to optimize processes, and around 50 employees working on building models and systems around those processes. There is no single department responsible for data quality. Consequently, we can say that a large number of employees need to work with data to achieve objectives that add value to the company, making the most of the information we have about our customers.

The decisions made by Rabobank based on the data of its clients are varied. With the aforementioned Know Your Client we start with fraud detection, the first thing we ask ourselves is if a certain transaction includes a possible fraud. In the regulatory aspect, there is an obligation to inform the corresponding regulator if someone completes a transaction that involves a tax haven. It is time to control the quality and origin of the data.