There is much grumbling in the industry about a surfeit of rules and regulations. But the main challenge banks face is not the number of regulations but the management of compliance. Ecobank Group, a pan-African bank based in Togo, through an acquisitive growth strategy, found itself managing 33 separate anti-money laundering and combatting financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) transaction monitoring systems across 36 African countries, while responding to 25 local regulators and multiple international regulatory bodies. This resulted in the complexity of operating and maintaining 60 independent servers, 30 databases, and 36 IT and compliance teams spread across the continent.

To fix a broken model, Ecobank partnered with FICO TONBELLER in a large-scale project to centralize its monitoring systems to one location, while ensuring each country affiliate has the ability to adapt monitoring processes to comply with local regulatory obligations.

In my latest Celent report, Ecobank Counters Money Laundering Across Africa, I examine how Ecobank achieved the implementation of a central AML/CFT compliance system and governance program.