Portman Building Society has completed a project to introduce software and online learning tools to help ensure compliance with the UK's anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.

The financial services provider processes about 10 million transactions per year, and decided that relying on manual procedures would not be sufficient to meet its legal obligations.

Andrew Jones, Portman's money laundering reporting officer, says that increasing requirements to provide consistent and verifiable information meant the firm had to review its AML strategy.

'No-one can afford to be complacent in these difficult times, especially with the legislation now in place,' he said.

Portman implemented software from STB Systems that analyses logs of financial transactions and generates daily reports for the company's AML team.

And to ensure staff understand how to deal with potential money laundering activity, Portman introduced an elearning programme that enables employees to undergo training at their own speed, while giving management an accurate record of who has been trained.

'With the increase in legislation, it's really hitting us now more and more at the coalface. I can't honestly see how companies can do without online training, because we've not only got to deliver it, we've got to demonstrate that we have delivered it.'

Jones says the challenge of compliance is greatest for small and medium sized businesses because, unlike large financial services firms, they typically lack the in-house expertise and available technology budgets.

'What we found when we looked at systems initially was that the price tag on some of them was way out of our league - hundreds of thousands of pounds,' he said.

'If you talk about the top 20 building societies, they can probably afford the type of package we've gone for. But even though we're talking tens of thousands of pounds, that's a lot of money to smaller firms.'

Jones says smaller companies become much more dependent on manual intervention and simple exception reports.

And the compliance challenge for finance providers is set to increase, further adding to costs.

From 31 October, all UK mortgage providers will become regulated by the Financial Services Authority, requiring companies to perform training and submit reports to the industry watchdog (Computing, 1 April).

'While it's all aimed at improving the quality of service given to customers, I suppose there does come a point when you have to say what happens if the customers aren't willing to pay for the service,' said Jones.