SEB Group centre of excellence for financial crime prevention being developed in Riga

Continuing to expand the functions of its business services centre SEB Global Services in Riga, SEB Group is currently developing its centre of excellence for financial crime prevention, which is responsible for delivering services such as compliance with anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing requirements, compliance with international sanctions, fulfilment of ‘know your customer’ (KYC) requirements and other related services from Riga to 12 different countries across the globe.
Therefore, new teams are currently being created and the existing ones are being expanded by attracting both experienced professionals as well as new employees with an interest to build their career in this field. According to the plans, by the end of this year the total number of employees in Riga specializing in prevention of financial crime could exceed 300 people, which is about twice as much compared to last year.
“With our knowledge and experience we have proven our ability to deliver to SEB Group companies in the Baltics, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Germany, USA and elsewhere top-quality services such as screening client portfolios and transactions against the sanction lists, complying with highly complex requirements for preventing financial crime and other functions. With the expansion of our centre of excellence we will also be able to offer our employees wider opportunities for development and acquiring competencies in the widest range of functions related to prevention of financial crime," says Aļesja Kirčenko, Deputy Head of SEB Global Services in Riga.
With the establishment of centre of excellence for financial crime prevention, SEB Group's competence in anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing, application of sanctions, KYC and other areas related to prevention of financial crime will be concentrated in Riga. SEB Global Services is already the largest company in Latvia in this niche both in terms of size of the staff as well as the international scale and comprehensive scope of functions.
SEB business services centre in Riga was established in 2006 and currently delivers business functions such as transaction services and cash management, global custody and sub custody, compliance and risk, private banking operations, trading operations and trading control, financial crime prevention, and IT development and maintenance to other SEB group companies in Scandinavia, the Baltics and other parts of the world.
Currently SEB Global Services in Riga employs almost 1000 people, but due to the expansion in areas related to prevention of financial crime as well as other business functions, the size of staff is expected to increase to 1100 employees by the end of this year.