Exploring the business benefits of regulatory compliance: the case of AML/CFT systems for banking institutions in Malaysia

It has been widely accepted that the banking industry is highly dependent on information technology (IT). Due to its pervasiveness and intertwining nature in most aspects of banking business, IT has also significantly become one of the critical components that facilitate the ability of banking institutions to meet regulatory requirements in an efficient and a cost-effective way. For instance, in the effort to mitigate the activities of money laundering and terrorism financing (ML/TF), various information on banking customers are timely and accurately gathered and analysed through automation. Furthermore, in many instances, IT systems exclusively built to achieve a similar objective are frequently established, and comparable to most IT implementations in the banking institutions, they are often can be equally regarded as a significant investment as well. Viewed from the longstanding debate on the value of IT investments to organisations, empirical research within the IS domain seemed to have placed less emphasis on the possible contribution of regulatory IT implementations. While it is easy to conceive that these IT deployments were never intended to directly benefit banking business from the outset, a study from this perspective should not be disregarded, but instead, warrant to be equally explored. The rationale for this statement can be attributed to the aforementioned assertion regarding the potentially substantial monetary investments required. In addition to this, it may also be due to the high tendency of stringent regulations being enforced in the future, and hence, could inevitably place a significant demand on organisational resources, and further influence their associated opportunity costs. For that reason, this study has attempted to fill the identified research gaps by conducting an investigation from the standpoint of a topical issue regarding anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing (AML/CFT) implementation efforts within banking institutions. Utilising a conceptual framework that leverages the resource-based view (RBV) to structurally analyse a list of research objectives, empirical evidence of business benefits and the associated capabilities through organisational AML/CFT efforts have indeed been discovered. The benefits are particularly in the form of having the opportunity to leverage various information and infrastructure that were established for regulatory purposes. Further evidence has also suggested that selected AML/CFT alerts have the potential of providing unique opportunity for the organisation to trigger time-critical event-based marketing activities, resulting in a possible improved competitive positioning (ICP). Importantly, by appreciating the insights obtained through the research, a conceptual framework is proposed, which may aid to structurally assess the possible benefits of any organisational regulatory IT implementations.