Challenges in Transaction Screening for Online Money Transfers and its Effects on the Customer Experiences in the UAE

ABSTRACT

The banks are financial institutions that are always at high financial risks such as money laundering, terrorist
financing, identity theft, cybercrimes, smuggling, illegal financing of weapons and drugs, corruption,
bribery, and other financial crimes. To combat these financial crimes, the banks implement Anti-Money
Laundering to combat financial crimes like money laundering and Counter Terrorist Funding procedures to
combat terrorist financing. In addition, the banks also implement compliance and diligence procedures such
as Know Your Customer and Customer Due Diligence which helps the banks to identify the actual details of
their customers to ensure privacy, financial stability, integrity, and transparency of the banks. The banks
implement Anti-Money Laundering/Counter-Terrorist Funding/Know Your Customer/Customer Due
Diligence procedures and for that they screen transactions of the customers. However, the banks sometimes
generate false positives and automated results that can negatively impact the customer satisfaction and
service. These screenings can disrupt the trust between the stakeholders of the banks and customers and
further impact the banks brand image and competitive advantage. Hence, the primary aim of the current
research is to analyse the challenges in transaction screening for online money transfers and its effect on the
customer experience in the UAE. In regard to this, the research aimed to achieve research objectives such as
identifying the challenges in transaction screening for online money transfers, analysing the current risk management practices, quantifying the customer experience that is affected by the challenges in transaction
screening, and recommend approaches that can be implemented in the UAE bank for efficient transaction
screening. To meet the objectives, the researcher conducted quantitative research in which a survey was
distributed to collect data. After the data collection from 50 respondents, descriptive analysis was conducted
along with certain tests such as descriptive analysis and correlation analysis in SPSS software. All the
research objectives were met during the research. However, the research would have been stronger if the
sample size would have been larger and if it would have been conducted on a large scale to increase the
generalizability of the research.

Keywords— Transaction Screening, online money transfers, customer experience, banking, money
laundering and customer satisfaction.