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Consulting giant Accenture is reportedly working with NAB on a “mammoth” project to address long-standing compliance issues that have recently led to increased regulatory scrutiny.
According to a report by the Sydney Morning Herald, National Australia Bank has engaged professional services giant Accenture in a secret project to combat financial crime compliance gaps and identify high-risk customers. The contract, called “Project Apollo,” is described in the paper as “mammoth,” with Accenture reportedly hiring additional staff to work specifically on the project.
The report follows a recent formal investigation by the Australian financial reporting regulator AUSTRAC (The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre) into potential serious and systemic non-compliance with anti-money laundering laws, with NAB chief Ross McEwan admitting it was needed. for further improvement in the area despite an investment of $800 million since 2017.
Last year, the bank halted or suspended around 100 turnaround projects in the weeks after the Covid-19 outbreak to save on its sizeable external consultancy bill – which a Consultancy.com.au analysis estimated at almost $300 million between the Big Four for the year. past decade. The bank also collaborated with McKinsey & Company on a risk culture audit the year before last.
In documents leaked to the banking royal commission in 2019, a risk report from NAB auditor Ernst & Young claimed that “The bank is only focused on solving problems with band-aid fixes rather than investing in long-term solutions. Ironically, the leaks have distracted the professional services industry itself, and the Big Four in particular, prompting a parliamentary inquiry into audit quality in Australia.
The alleged failures at the bank – with reports of a year-long backlog of high-risk customer screenings and spiraling processing times for investigating suspicious transactions – are widely blamed on a number of factors, including outdated technology systems, employee accidents and compliance staff. contracting, its constant restructuring and increase, and as a result unrealistic workloads, sagging morale and high staff turnover.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald report, which cites several unnamed sources, the NAB-Accenture collaboration is drawing on “enormous resources” to examine hundreds of thousands of customer profiles that have been identified as problematic. As for the scope of the project, one of the publication’s sources indicated that it currently takes up at least a third of the current financial crime workforce.
Also exposed were the tantalizing claims that NAB’s core technology systems are now more than two decades old, so if an existing customer is red-flagged (which could be due to previous non-compliance with basic data collection and monitoring and updating requirements), Financial Crime Analysts often they have to manually go through several years’ worth of statements to spot any suspicious transactions.
Chris Linde, senior director of compliance, conduct and financial crime at NAB since 2018 and group money laundering reporting officer, completed his Big Four bingo card during his career and after three and a half years at Deloitte joined NAB as senior partner Earlier in his career he spent seven years in the forensics department of KPMG between London and Sydney, a year at EY in the UK and three years at PwC in South Africa.
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