Eastnets turns to Oracle Blockchain Platform on OCI to help financial institutions reduce compliance risk by using accurate watchlists.
“With Oracle Blockchain’s high reliability and SLAs, our financial institution clients have always-on access to the latest sanctions updates. Its API-based approach to querying the audit ledger makes it easy to trace any update on the blockchain to its origin. Further, the built-in audit features help us demonstrate the continuous integrity of the ledger.”
Tareq Shaheen, Product Management Director, Payment Solutions, EastnetsThe Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system is a global messaging network that financial institutions use to accurately send and receive information relating to money transfers. Institutions must also comply with Anti–Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) rules, maintaining accurate watchlists of sanctioned individuals or entities at all times. Most manual watchlist updates happen once a day, leaving institutions open to non-compliance between the time an entity is sanctioned by a government agency and the time screening begins.
Also, conventional watchlist updates carry the burden and risk associated with manual processes, unreliable systems, data inconsistencies, and process delays. For example, false-positive alerts for transactions that appear suspicious but are legitimate force institutions to waste time investigating, which results in transaction fulfillment delays. Gaps in the current process and systems can undermine sanction enforcement and data inconsistency across financial institutions, which can lead to a lack of harmony in decision-making.
UAE-based Eastnets is a provider of compliance and payment solutions for the financial services sector, with over 800 financial institution customers globally, including 11 of the top 50 banks. The firm’s services help clients optimize operations, reduce false-positives, and transform their SWIFT infrastructure with a next-generation toolbox for financial security. Eastnets was seeking an innovative and future-proof approach to automate the sanctions list update process and provide a highly secure, scalable solution with real-time feeds from sanction aggregators to participating financial institutions.
"Eastnets selected Oracle Blockchain on OCI for its resiliency, performance, and strict SLAs for banking systems."
Eastnets evaluated multiple blockchain providers and selected Oracle Blockchain to take advantage of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) secure cloud platform, seamless integration capabilities, rich REST API interfaces, high system availability, and robust management and administration capabilities. Oracle Blockchain’s capabilities for a built-in, tamper-evident audit trail, non-repudiated, and end-to-end audit traceability were determined to be best suited to power the company’s ChainFeed watchlist update solution for its client portfolio of financial institutions. Additionally, Oracle offered superior support and overall customer experience compared to other blockchain platforms in the market.
"Oracle Blockchain’s built-in, tamper-evident immutable ledger provides end-to-end audit traceability of sanctions updates automatically."
After adopting OCI, Eastnets relied on Oracle Blockchain to develop its ChainFeed solution, which transformed a process that was manual, untimely, and risk-prone into a fully automated, secure, and real-time cloud service.
Oracle Blockchain allowed Eastnets to gain real-time updates of granular sanctions information stored in an immutable ledger. Whenever a new update was made to watchlist, ChainFeed would send an event notification to each of the supported banks, enabling the anti–money laundering system to pull the required updates immediately and record an audit record indicating that the update was applied by a specific bank. ChainFeed helps financial institutions avoid the risk of delays with instant sanction list updates and real-rime list loading.
Oracle Blockchain platform’s distributed-ledger technology works without interrupting clients’ regular operations. Each entity within a client’s organization works from the same version of the AML/CFT watchlist, eliminating errors and inconsistencies in versions and the need to perform manual reconciliations. Also, the platform’s granular permissions and cryptographics prevent unauthorized access to the system.
Most importantly, with Oracle’s distributed and immutable ledger, any update on the blockchain is time-stamped and can be traced to its origin, saving time and money while also eliminating manual reconciliations during audits. This eliminated human intervention and lag time in fulfilling valid transactions while also instantly updating the watchlist on the company’s screening engine.