Juni's commitment to fighting financial crime

The importance and challenges of fighting financial crime

When you provide financial services to ecommerce businesses, as Juni does, no matter how fast the fintech industry grows and moves, fighting financial crime and creating a safe and secure environment for your customers is your main priority.

Simultaneously, you ensure a seamless user experience and frictionless transactions for their ecommerce activities. No blocked cards due to large payments to Facebook. No suspended transaction due to doubts about Mailchimp, the payment receiver. That means you help them grow their business whilst preventing your products or systems from being abused. It's a pledge and a duty.

As an industry innovator and a disruptor, Juni constantly tries to bridge the gap between safety and speed. That is the challenge to delivering the next level in customer experience. How do you bring two opposing forces together? Controls vs Freedom.

To understand how we work and what we stand for, we want to share more about how Juni operates to ensure your safety and provide you with a best-in-class financial ecosystem.

What is financial crime?

According to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), financial criminality is the dishonest manipulation and abuse of the financial system for personal gain. For a clearer picture and concrete examples, here are the main types of financial crime:

• Fraud
• Electronic crime
• Money laundering
• Terrorist financing
• Bribery and corruption
• Market abuse and insider dealing
• Information security

And in terms of figures?

Fraud costs the European economy almost €1.2 trillion per year whilst the total amount of fraud in the UK is €230 billion – more than €7,000 lost per second every day. The significant figures demonstrate that financial criminality means less is shared amongst the many due to the destructive actions of the few. As Interpol rightly reminds us, "we are all impacted by financial crime which has taken on a whole new dimension with the rapid advancement of digital technology."

It is important to note that financial crime has many faces. The scope and complexity need to be understood and measured to implement the controls and resources needed to combat it effectively.

What helps us to fight financial crime effectively?

The first tools we have to tackle financial criminality are laws, regulations, rules, and effective enforcement. These mechanisms ensure that financial crime is appropriately recognised and punished. Private organizations such as Juni are part of a broader framework that compels financial institutions to operate responsibly, i.e., take the necessary measures to guarantee their customers' safety and collectively deny space for financial crime.

Advances in RegTech (regulation technology) have enabled smaller and newer fintech start-ups to move forward safely at great speed. What took first-generation fintechs a decade to build now takes second-generation financial institutions such as Juni a matter of months to develop and release. This leap is possible due to industry specialists, risk-as-a-service and progress made in security-based tech.

The developments made in Analytics, Data-Science, Modelling, Compliance, and Specialist Risk organizations have come together to make life very difficult for low-to-medium grade fraudsters. Elaborate rulesets mean that millions of data points can be scanned and scored in seconds. Advances in automation can speed up company and customer registration, acceptance criteria and processes. We can now move at speed and reduce user friction points by introducing sophisticated registration flows.

We have to implement controls to keep our customers safe and ensure we are compliant with industry standards and regulations. For the sake of transparency, we at Juni, feel it is also our duty to share more details with you, so you can understand better.

1. We need to know who we are onboarding. Juni only registers businesses, so we sometimes need to dig deeper to understand who owns a business.

2. Ultimate beneficiaries of companies need to be identified and screened. This reduces the risk of companies being used as convenient disguises for criminal actors. The more we know, the fewer options are available to a would-be fraudster or money launderer.

3. We would love to be able to take customer information at face value. For the vast majority of our users, we probably could. But you can't measure what you can't validate. We need to validate information against external sources. As part of our KYB (Know Your Business) process, Juni verifies and validates all data points provided to us by our applicants.

4. We regularly screen our user population for suspicious activity. Our goal is to be as effective as possible at reducing the risk of money laundering, fraud, or terrorist financing, causing as little disruption as possible to our users.

Anti-money laundering (AML) mechanisms are as good as the rules or models deployed to detect suspicious behaviour. You can quickly become very academic and lose sight of the customer you want to help and protect. Some systems are static and might not detect complex patterns. That's why Juni's FinCrime team strives to carry out holistic risk controls that are suitable for our specific customer profiles. Various customer types operate based on their needs and goals. There is a diversity in this that can not be disrupted. It would be detrimental to the user experience and the entire point for building the company in the first place. Juni must customise the risk mechanisms to the customer and not the other way round.

At Juni, our FinCrime team works parallel to our Product, Business Development, Marketing and Customer Success teams to ensure that we are always better at offering value to our customers. Feedback is relayed directly back to control functions, which means we will never allow ourselves to drift apart from our product.

We do not take offboarding lightly, and each decision to part ways with a customer must passthrough an internal review. Strict regulations govern us in the EU and UK, which legally limit us from sharing every detail. What we can communicate openly and unequivocally is our zero tolerance towards criminality.

Our commitment to your safety

Juni's vision is to be the financial platform for ecommerce entrepreneurs. We want to raise the bar and set new and better standards for fincrime in the industry. Fraud and financial crime have no place on our platform nor among our customers. We value trust and safety more than anything. That's why we continually strive to take our ability to fight financial crime to the next level.

We want you to have peace of mind by being with us, knowing you are teaming up with a companion that provides you with the safest environment possible. We'll keep enforcing the rules at all times and with no exception while we'll continue to adapt our processes to stay one step ahead of existing and potential threats.

For more information, visit https://help.juni.co/security or read our Terms and Conditions.