Australian Property Scout x First AML

Background

Australian Property Scout is a national investment buyers agency, specialising in finding high-quality, growth-focused investment properties across Australia.

Clients sign on from anywhere in the country and stay with the firm until they own a property. This successful model means they execute a high volume of property transactions per year and conduct AML checks on both the client and the vendor on every transaction.

The situation

A buyers agency is not a selling agency, and almost no technology built for traditional real estate is a good fit. Australian Property Scout had already built its own CRM, so didn’t have high hopes when it came to AML software. 

Clients sign on and are vetted extensively before there is a property sourced, so verification can happen early. While on the selling side, an agent lists a property and does not always know their client yet. That’s two clients and two sets of AML checks for every deal, making the volume of work twice as heavy than a regular real estate firm. 

With all this in mind, Georgia Murray, Australian Property Scout’s Operations Manager and AMLCO started by running a full audit of the AML legislation and broke the requirements into segments, including where a buyer's agency's obligations differ from a selling agent's. Given the volume, one thing was decided early: verification would be outsourced because it was just too much to do in house.

They started down the outsourced path but soon realised it was the wrong direction when their chosen supplier wasn’t communicating, the portal kept crashing and the process just didn’t work or align with the speed in which they operate.

What Georgia wanted was a process her team could execute at the pace the business already moves and that clients would look at and think: “this is easy, this is working.”

The solution

In the same week that Georgia was looking for a replacement option to the outsourced supplier, Georgia was buying a property herself, and her accountant sent her a First AML check to complete. She had been evaluating that exact process in meetings all week, and here it was arriving from a firm she had no commercial interest in, taking her minutes. She went straight to her accountant to find out more.

"I couldn’t believe First AML's speed and service."

- Georgia Murray, Australian Property Scout’s Operations Manager and AMLCO

"I didn't realise that these platforms had developed to an extent where you don't need the outsourced party on the other end. I thought there always had to be that level of human integration." She had assumed a business of their size needed “boots on the ground” chasing people. The system behind the check was what made the chasing unnecessary.

She was still sceptical but after spending more time with the First AML platform and team she was convinced. 

“I couldn’t believe the speed and service,” says Georgia.

Before any configuration was touched, Georgia and her First AML account manager worked through how AML would actually run across the business: where verification sits for a client entering client success, where the vendor check sits for their team once contracts exchanged, and how entities, escalations and expiries would be handled. The First AML platform was configured to match the Australian Property Scout AML program and the First AML team updated training to account for the previous supplier process to help ease the transition. Georgia added to it with entity structures, expiries and the edge cases that only come up in investment buying. 

Nothing in the risk assessment changed and nothing in the process changed. What changed was who could execute a check, and how long it took.

“The First AML team could tell I was under the pump and just got on with it. They’re fast movers, the platform is fast and implementation was done in a week.” 

Results

The operation Georgia set out to build, one her own team executes at the pace the business moves and clients find easy, is now how Australian Property Scout runs AML - effortlessly.

“The team love First AML and clients are completing checks in about 2 minutes.”

“The team love First AML and clients are completing checks in about 2 minutes.” Notes Georgia. And her concern of being a square peg in a round software hole is long gone. “First AML is so layered and can be tailored so easily to each business. You can tell it’s gone through years of development and preparedness”  

“Preparedness is the word for First AML. New features are coming out every week, comms are excellent, the training collateral is fantastic too, they’re so responsive and the audit trail provides peace of mind with everything sitting in one secure place.”

In addition, the many clients who had gone through the previous supplier’s process were reverified within a week of go-live on First AML.

Conclusion

Georgia's advice to firms still working through this is simple "Do more investigation. You’re choosing a company to really rely on who will be handling sensitive client information so know what you’re getting and make sure they’re prepared for anything. Most importantly - make sure you prioritise your clients with a seamless process and platform so it’s easy for them.”

Australian Property Scout was prepared. The audit was done, the risk assessment written, the team trained and none of it had to change. What they needed was a solution that keeps up with a high volume of transactions a month without clients feeling any of it. That process is running smoothly, on both sides of every deal and it’s easy.