Mauritius Commercial Bank announces multi-year partnership with Windward

By Pavithra R

The Mauritius Commercial Bank, the longest-standing and leading banking institution in Mauritius has announced entering into a multi-year partnership with Windward, the Predictive Intelligence company applying AI to transform global maritime trade, to enhance the bank’s due diligence and monitoring processes linked to its commodity trade finance business.

Under the partnership, MCB will leverage Windward’s AI-powered solution to increase its efficiency across maritime trade finance practices and strengthen compliance and trade-based money laundering screening processes.

Financial institutions across Mauritius and around the world are under increased pressure by both national and international compliance regulators to implement extensive due-diligence processes, especially in light of new sanctions advisories by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the US and the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) in the UK. Many forward thinking financial institutions are turning to AI systems to bolster effectiveness, streamline lengthy processes, and gain insights into deceptive practices used to facilitate financial crimes.

“Windward’s platform was the natural choice when we were looking to boost efficiency of our due diligence and Know Your Vessel processes. As maritime trade becomes increasingly complex to navigate, our partnership with Windward enables us to more effectively meet regulatory expectations and enhances our efforts to improve business operations, reduce risk, and improve compliance across our commodity finance business,” said Zaahir Sulliman, Head of Specialized Finance at Mauritius Commercial Bank.

The partnership is built on Windward’s recent announcement of partnership with Danske Bank. Windward’s AI based dynamic risk solution provides FIs with a state-of-the-art platform to effectively streamline the risk management journey.

“We pride ourselves on partnering with best-in-class financial institutions. As trade finance becomes more complex due to increased regulation, it is essential for banks to enhance their compliance processes and to be better informed on the entities they conduct business with. We are proud to push the digital transformation of the industry forward by providing Mauritius Commercial Bank with the highest level of comprehensive risk-based analysis of maritime trade,” said Ami Daniel, CEO and Co-Founder of Windward.