Europe’s largest online and mobile consumer lender wins FICO Decisions Award for scale and speed of compliance program

Highlights:

• Fintech 4finance Group deployed FICO cloud solutions for anti-money laundering and know-your-customer compliance across 10 countries in nine months
• The compliance solutions are supported by less than one FTE per country, and have not impacted 4finance’s promise to issue loans in 15 minutes
• 4finance Group has won a 2017 FICO Decisions Award for Regulatory Compliance
• 4finance Group is Europe’s largest online and mobile consumer lender

4finance Group, Europe’s largest online and mobile consumer lender, has deployed FICO^® TONBELLER^®Siron^® solutions for anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) compliance across 10 countries and 20 back-office systems in just nine months. The cloud-based FICO solutions are delivering audit-verified compliance with global and regional regulations while maintaining 4finance’s promise to issue customers a loan in 15 minutes. For these achievements, 4finance Group has won a 2017 FICO Decisions Award for Regulatory Compliance.

“Working with FICO, we created an AML/KYC framework that bolstered our compliance without compromising on speed and our promise to customers,” said AndisGrandāns, AML Officer at 4finance Group. “In fact, fewer than 0.5 percent of customers applying for their first loan feel any impact on the speed of their loan being disbursed. As proof of our success, we have already undergone a regulatory audit on our AML/KYC processes and received a clean bill of health.”

Speed to Market

4finance Group is a global digital finance business that combines the discipline of a rigorous, highly regulated consumer lender with the capabilities and drive of a fast-paced, data-driven, borrower-focused fintech. It took on this project to ensure compliance with new requirements of the 4th European Union AML Directive in online consumer lending.

“Our challenge was to find an AML compliance solution that was flexible in the way it could be integrated, but absolutely robust when it came to compliance capabilities,” said Grandāns. “Our speed to market and our ability to deliver funds to our customers quickly are fundamental to our business. We needed to ensure compliance in a way that did not compromise our brand promise of delivering fast funds to creditworthy people. We chose FICO TONBELLER because it offered us the fastest deployment, cloud for expansion to new markets, and the most powerful capabilities for detecting criminal activity.”

Scalability was critical for 4finance. In fact, after going live with the first 10 countries, 4finance is implementing the solutions in two further countries and integrating five more products from an acquired company, Friendly Finance Group.

“Designing the solution for the first country, we sought to create an architecture that would allow easy customisation for the next countries while keeping the core unchanged,” said Grandāns. “A quick rollout from country to country was a key requirement, which is why we chose to deploy in the cloud. Using a multi-tenant option, we could quickly replicate common features from one country to another and at the same time be able to adapt the solution to the specifics of local regulations.”

Multiple Checks

4finance Group uses two modules of the FICO^® TONBELLER^® SIRON^® Anti-Financial Crime Solutions suite:

• SIRON^® KYC screens customers against various watch lists (provided by Dow Jones), including sanction lists, special interest persons and politically exposed persons. Screening is performed when a customer applies for the first loan, and in a nightly batch that checks the whole customer database against any changes in the watch lists.
• SIRON^® AML identifies suspicious customer behavior patterns. Each night all new transactions and the whole data set is run against the pre-set business rules, generating alerts to work with. 4finance monitors abnormal single transactions, aggregated transactions and scenario combinations.

“4finance impressed me with the complexity of their compliance project,” said Giorgi Alibegashvili, strategic project manager at TBC Bank, one of this year’s FICO Decisions Awards judges and a 2016 award winner. “The cloud implementation is impressive, and the connection to multiple back-office systems is very tough. The fact that their regulatory audit didn’t produce any recommendations for improvement demonstrates what a strong approach they have built.”

“4finance Group represent the best of the new wave of fintechs that are disrupting financial services markets worldwide,” said Torsten Mayer, vice president for compliance solutions at FICO. “They take their responsibility to stop financial crime, and the criminal activities it funds, very seriously.”

About the FICO Decisions Awards

The FICO Decisions Awards recognise organisations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measureable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2017 judges are:

• Giorgi Alibegashvili, Strategic Project Manager, TBC Bank (2016 award winner
• Julie Conroy, Research Director, Aite Group
• Douglas Gray, Director, Enterprise Data & Analytics, Southwest Airlines (2016 winner)
• Joy Macknight, Transaction Banking and Technology Editor, The Banker
• Daniel Mayo, Chief Analyst, Financial Services Technology, Ovum

The winners of the FICO Decisions Awards will be spotlighted at FICO World 2018, the Decisions Conference, April 16-19 in Miami Beach, Florida.