Homeloan Management Limited

Money laundering is a massive problem worldwide with billions of pounds of ‘dirty' money being generated and then laundered each year from criminal activity. This has led many governments since the early 1990's to introduce a wide range of laws and measures to combat the problem. In 1991 the European Union issued an important directive to all EU states requiring them to put appropriate laws in place.

In the UK, a Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, is a piece of information which alerts law enforcement in that country that certain client/customer activity is in some way suspicious and might indicate money laundering or terrorist financing.

Submitting a SAR provides law enforcement with valuable information on potential criminality as well as protecting UK financial institutions from the risk of laundering the proceeds of crime.

By submitting a SAR to the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), financial institutions, such as Homeloan Management Ltd, are complying with their obligations under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

As soon as it is ‘known' or ‘suspected' that a person is engaged in money laundering or dealing in criminal property, a SAR must be submitted to SOCA.

Once a SAR is received by SOCA it is held on a secure database with strictly limited access to appropriate law enforcement and government agency staff. More than 200,000 SARs are received each year by SOCA's UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU), and information is always held in the strictest confidence.

HML uses Investigator as its repository for the capture of all suspicious activity reports. They developed a Wizard that allows their staff to quickly and easily populate SARs within the Investigator database.

When a suspicious transaction takes place, the Wizard is initiated and the HML staff member is required to enter a small amount of information. The Wizard then extracts essential data from HML's financial transaction database, and it passes that information, plus data entered into the Wizard, across to Investigator via XML.

Subsequently these reports are passed to SOCA for further investigation.