Nice Actimize is moving into the mid-sized financial institutions market with a cloud platform that will initially provide an anti-money laundering (AML) software-as-a-service solution and later a complete suite of financial crime applications.

The AML solution, Actimize AML Essentials, is a packaged and variant version of the company’s AML enterprise software. It covers suspicious activity monitoring, watch list filtering and customer due diligence and Know Your Customer (KYC), and provides alert management, reporting and suspicious activity report filing, but it does not include as many process options as the enterprise software, instead offering the most common and used processes.

The suspicious activity monitoring module of AML Essentials came to market this week, with the watch list filtering and customer due diligence and KYC modules due to be rolled out over the next few months.

Cenk Ipeker, head of Nice Actimize’s cloud, says: “Regulatory scrutiny of institutions below the top tier means many smaller banks face the same problems as tier one institutions. This segment is looking at Nice Actimize type tool sets and needs robust solutions, but these types of solutions require a lot of data, internal systems and expertise. The need is there, but not the wherewithal. So, we decided to address the need by providing cloud solutions that can cover multiple regions and client types, and can be rapidly and easily deployed.”

While Nice Actimize has moved some of its enterprise software into the cloud, Ipeker and his team are working in an independent business unit dedicated to building a cloud platform for mid-sized financial institutions and helping them implement solutions and achieve best practice.

Ipeker says: “We are trying to expand into the mid-sized financial institutions market and are receiving a lot of interest. My team is dedicated to building cloud solutions for this segment and will ultimately build a complete financial crime platform in the cloud. AML is first and we will follow with additions such as fraud.”