Large banks ABN Amro, Rabobank and ING are going to significantly strengthen their security sector. In total, they want to hire an additional XNUMX employees to monitor customers and cash flows.
Kees van Dijkhausen, CEO of ABN Amro, attributes this to the problems we all saw last year, such as the Danske Bank case, where the money laundering scandal took place, after which the CEO and some other employees who held high positions were fired. positions.
Therefore, the finalization and improvement of programs for the international credit card department (ICS - International Card Services) and the department for working with small and medium-sized businesses (de mkb-bank) has now been accelerated.
For this purpose, the bank has reserved € 85 million. In addition, it is planned to hire about 400 additional employees for permanent work in the Customer Due Dilligence department, where a thousand people already work.
At Rabobank, about the same number of people work in the same branch. One of the bank's employees reports that they are looking for another 250 new employees in this branch. And as soon as possible. “We have already invested hundreds of millions in customer verification and continue to do so,” he adds.
An ING spokesman says that they will employ several hundred people this year. How many people work for this bank in the customer control department has never been disclosed, but there are significantly more people than ABN Amro and Rabo combined, simply because it is a larger bank. They say that this number is several thousand both domestically and abroad.
Customer verification has apparently become a major concern of banks. Everyone saw what the lack of such controls on money laundering led to. ING had to pay a € 775 million fine as the customer control system did not perform well enough.
Recently it became known that Rabobank was also fined 1 million euros from DNB (De Nederlandsche Bank) due to insufficient supervision over the ownership structures (eigendomsstructure) of commercial accounts. Also, the insurance company Vivat (formerly Reaal) received a reprimand from DNB for insufficient customer verification.
ABN Amro has so far avoided a public reprimand, but the tightening of the control regime has forced it to increase its security efforts. “Criminals are getting smarter and smarter. We have to make sure that we don't fall behind them,” says Van Dijkhousen (CEO of ABN Amro).
An ABN Amro spokesman said that the cost of controlling customers and cash flows has tripled since 2013. The bank spends about 100 million euros on this a year, and this amount will increase in the coming years, Van Dijkhausen suggests. However, in the words of Clifford Abrahams of the bank's CFO, this is part of the "operating license", as only banks with a well-functioning control system can succeed in the modern world, and the rest cannot.
Rising costs are also affecting profits, with the € 85 million that ABN Amro has reserved for security spending did not go unnoticed and was an important reason why fourth-quarter earnings were much lower than expected.
Source: https://fd.nl/
Publication Date: 11.04.2019
