Your Money Under More Scrutiny

By Manu Joseph

Pressured by anti-terror laws, banks will be spending billions of dollars over the next few years on software to counter money laundering. The software will automatically track suspicious financial transactions, but it will also monitor millions of innocuous ones, and may make it harder to cheat on your taxes.

Thanks to the stringent requirements of the Patriot Act, enacted after 9/11 to choke the supply of terror funds, and the unambiguous threats of steep fines and even imprisonment of bank directors if their organizations facilitate money laundering, U.S. financial institutions are very enthusiastic about installing anti-money-laundering software.

Between 2005 and 2008, American banks are forecast to spend about $14.7 billion on anti-money-laundering software, hardware, maintenance and other compliance-related activities, according to Neil Katkov, a Tokyo-based analyst with Celent Communications. Europe and Asia are expected to spend over $11.6 billion during that period.

By 2006, 94 percent of large financial institutions in the United States will have installed anti-money-laundering, or AML, technologies, according to Celent.

Already, the United States is the global driver of anti-laundering software. And the number of transactions reported to government agencies, like the United States' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, is growing fast. In 2004, banks reported 14.8 million transactions to FinCEN. That's 600,000 reports more than in 2003, according to FinCEN's annual report for 2004 (.pdf).

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