A day in the life of... an Investigation Team Leader

Hi, I'm 👋

Currently I’m a Team Lead for one of the FinCrime Investigation teams within Danske Bank. We are working with monitoring customer’s investment activities to prevent money laundering, terror financing, tax evasion and market manipulation to some extent.  

I’ve started my career in AML a little over 4 years ago when I joined Danske Bank as an Associate Investigator. I grew step by step to become a Senior Officer and around a year ago I became a Team Lead. I’ve gathered my experience by participating in various projects internally and have been working with Quantexa daily for around 3 years now. Outside of work I really enjoy listening to music (I collect vinyl records) as well as reading books. 

How do you normally start your working day?

My day starts pretty early as I’m an early bird and I like to go through my tasks for today, check what my team has to do throughout the day and plan their activities.  

How would you describe a typical day as a Quantexa user?

I’m using Quantexa mostly for planning nowadays, to check how many cases we have left to handle. However, before becoming a Team Lead I used Quantexa daily for investigations – open up a case, see what activity has been triggered within it, investigate the activity according to our procedure, decide on the outcome of the case and move on to the next one.

"Quantexa made investigation easier and more concentrated as it helped by building relevant networks and showing information not only about the client on which the case was generated on, but also other relevant clients or organisations."

What do you enjoy most in your role?

Mostly I enjoy working with people and helping them develop personally and professionally. My position also allows me to be part of important decisions regarding our process which helps me develop further in the AML field, broaden my perspective and grow personally.  

What are your main goals as a Team Leader?

One of my main goals is to ensure smooth workflow within the team. In addition to that, I’m responsible for the overall wellness of my team members, so that they feel safe, heard and motivated at work.  

Financial crime involves a lot of data - how does Quantexa help you with data analysis and pattern recognition?

Quantexa is a great tool to reveal patterns of different types of activities. Its functionalities, such as Transaction Explorer, let you analyse significant amount of data by giving you breakdowns on various data points. In addition, network capabilities enables you to find all relevant relations between the customer you are investigating and any other connected parties. This gives the investigator a bigger picture about the investigation object. 

How does Quantexa assist you in assessing and managing the risk associated with potential financial crimes?

The Quantexa alerting model allows the investigators to look at several risks at the same time. By providing contextual monitoring, introducing network risks, as well as several scores at the same time, Quantexa gives an opportunity to evaluate the object of investigation from several different angles and capture potential financial crime from a broader perspective. 

Can you share a success story about how Quantexa helped uncover a previously undetected risk?

A few examples relate to Quantexa network capabilities. One of the risky types of activities that is being monitored is related to equal and opposite buy/sells by connected parties within short periods of time, against the same security. Quantexa network allows us to look into such activity without any disturbances as it already filters out the activity that is performed by somehow related parties. Two individuals that share the same family name and address (indicating family relation by Quantexa) were trading the same securities on the same day and even though the overall number of units traded did not match, by checking how the trades were actually executed, we have managed to identify that these trades were actually wash trades. Wash trading is a process when trader(s) buy(s) and sell(s) a security for the express purpose of feeding misleading information to the market. Relevant authorities were notified about such type of activity and further actions took place to prevent financial crime from happening. 

Another example was that by pinpointing a network risk, Quantexa allowed my team to capture the activity of unusual cashing out of funds as it revealed a pattern that the funds were previously received from a family member and the actual origin of funds was sale of property in a potentially risky country. The activity was unusual as the customer used to cash out the maximum allowed amount every day and there was no way of telling where the funds are going to be used. Without Quantexa network, the pattern might have been undetected. Activity was further reported to relevant authorities. 

The views and opinions expressed in this communication are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of Danske Bank.