2nd National Chapter Meeting
Summary of Proceedings

The second meeting of ARIFAC was organized by Standard Chartered Bank, India (SCB India) as a day-long workshop at their BKC office in Mumbai on October 19, 2023 which was attended by participants from 58 member entities.

1. In the welcome remarks, Mr. Vinod Patil, Chief Compliance Officer, SCB India & South Asia and Designated Director greeted all the participants and touched upon significance of having such Private-Private Partnership framework for information sharing on emerging trends relevant to AML/CFT compliance. He also thanked the delegates of Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-IND) and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for their gracious participation.

2. The meeting was moderated by Mr. Jairam Manglani, Head, Financial Crime and Compliance, SCB India. He apprised the audience about the agenda for the meeting. He emphasized upon the need to take the actionable of previous ARIFAC meeting for follow-through and discussion on emerging industry issues and best practices.

3. During first session, Mr. Jayesh Kadam, Director, FCC, Risk Specialist, SCB India, had presented on ‘Best practice approach on the Beneficial Owner (BO) identification’ covering aspects like FATF recommendation and National Risk Assessment (NRA) outcome on identification of BO, local regulatory landscape on BO & significant requirements on BO across various legal entity types, BO identification controls across the client lifecycle, best practice of unwrapping of BOs followed by case study.

4. In the next session, Dr. Srinivas Yanamandra, Group Head - Regulatory Affairs & Policy of Paytm, had outlined the key points of ‘Best practice paper on the NRA exercise for leveraging in the payment aggregator industry’. He introduced the concept of the concept of KYM (Know Your Merchant) for the PA industry.

5. In the subsequent session, Maj Gaurav Chaturvedi (Retd), Incharge, AML & Fraud Risk Management, NPCI, had shared Industry-wide trend capturing by way of sharing of centralized AML alert management and disposal process for wider knowledge of REs involved in payment industry. He outlined on the discovery of unique typologies for which alerts are separately shared with members.

Action point: NPCI will design and share an SOP for all the recipient entities of the alerts of the unique typologies.

6. Next session was presented by Ms. Rajalaxmi V, Chief Manager, Transaction Monitoring, State Bank of India on ‘Brief typology report summarizing the latest trends in frauds / ML using latest technologies and cyber capabilities’ covering modus operandi of various cyber crimes like phishing & spoofing, spyware, Internet banking fraud, spam, Identity theft, Business email compromise, ATM card skimming, distributed denial of service attack, pig butchering scam etc. and capabilities to fight cyber crimes.

7. During the last session, Mr. Jairam Manglani, Head of FCC, India and South Asia, SCB India, highlighted the key aspects on ‘Challenges faced by Banks in Cyber Enabled Frauds’ like rising cases of Cyber Enabled Frauds and the steps that can be taken by member entities to tackle them with the help of relevant case studies.

8. The meeting was concluded with the closing remarks from Ms. Vasud Torsekar, Joint Director, FIU-IN). She outlined the need for more collaboration and seamless communications amongst the regulated entities. She also prescribed the delegates to stay abreast with the latest trends of the industry and be prepared for addressing the new challenges. She also touched upon emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial neural networks, artificial immune systems, and intelligent agents and about exploring their use case.

9. All the presented topics were responded positively by the participants. FIU-IND and RBI officials have well appreciated, the agenda of the meeting, the participation from the member entities and overall organization of the meeting.