A Reference Model for Anti-Money Laundering in the Financial Sector

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) can be seen as a central problem for financial institutions because of the need to detect compliance violations in various customer contexts. Changing regulations and the strict supervision of financial authorities create an even higher pressure to establish an effective working compliance program. To support financial institutions in building a simple but efficient compliance program we develop a reference model that describes the process and data view for one key process of AML based on literature analysis and expert interviews. Therefore, this paper describes the customer identification process (CIP) as a part of an AML program using reference modeling techniques. The contribution of this work is (i) the application of multi-perspective reference modeling resulting in (ii) a reference model for AML customer identification. Overall, the results help to understand the complexity of AML processes and to establish a sustainable compliance program.