How Rabobank puts its Anti-Money Laundering policy into action

We do this in every way we can. At Rabobank, we know very well that together we can achieve more than we can alone. We work on safeguarding the financial system together with our customers, the government and other gatekeepers of the financial system. We do so with full dedication. Cooperation and helping each other out is what we stand for as a cooperative.

The world constantly evolves. New laws and regulations, changing geopolitical situations and criminals who are trying to abuse the system in new ways. That is why Rabobank is constantly evolving, adapting our processes, training our employees and improving our working methods.

In recent years, we have taken various actions to further improve our role as a gatekeeper. In this role, we help to prevent abuse of the financial system, such as money laundering and terrorist financing. From 2016 in the Netherlands and in 2023 worldwide, activities related to Financial and Economic Crime Prevention (FEC) have been centralized.

Following an instruction from the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) in 2021, Rabobank has enhanced its remediation programme in consultation with DNB. To further accelerate this remediation programme, FEC activities were assigned to a new member of the Rabobank Group Management Board in October 2022: the Chief Financial Economic Crime Officer (CFECO).

Year after year, investments have been made in expanding the number of FEC employees. In 2024, 8,000 employees worldwide worked at FEC-Rabobank. By the end of 2024, the majority of the remediation programme was successfully completed. In the coming period, in consultation with DNB, we will focus on finalising the last elements of the program and safeguarding our quality standards.

Every day, Rabobank works to solve the challenges that arise. At Rabobank, we know very well that we can solve problems together. That is why we want to work even better with other banks, the government, the FIU (Financial Intelligence Unit) and the police. Each of these parties has its own role, and together we can achieve more than Rabobank alone. In recent years, we at Rabobank have been actively committed to working on public/private partnerships with the aim of helping to make the financial system, and thus society, safer.

By investing in our employees and systems, our contribution to an increasingly secure financial system is becoming more effective and efficient. This enables us to do our job better and better, with less impact on our customers. One example is the automatic processing of changes at registry of the Chamber of Commerce. With our automated systems and increasingly with the use of artificial intelligence, we are able to monitor transactions with ever-greater precision, closely investigating any unusual transactions or other signs of possible abuse. In this way, we help to protect the financial system.

Our thousands of FEC colleagues have their own role, task and specialism and thus make their contribution to safeguard the financial system and our customers without unnecessarily burdening them.

For example, the Customer Due Diligence (CDD) department ensures that we have a clear picture of who our customers are, what the nature of their business is, where the money comes from and where it goes. This helps us, for example, to prevent malicious parties from opening a bank account.

In addition to CDD, we also conduct transaction monitoring. This is performed among others by our experts, who are trained to recognize unusual transactions that could indicate abuse of the system. They do this by assessing both historical and current transaction data.

We work on thematic investigations through FEC Investigations. This allows us to recognize existing or future patterns and contribute to exposing criminal networks. We closely cooperate with other private and public parties.

Finally, there are various departments that work together to ensure that colleagues in areas such as CDD and transaction monitoring can do their jobs better and better. For example, FEC-Tech, where we are constantly investigating how we can use technological innovation to improve the work of our colleagues, with the aim of protecting customers and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our processes.