Financial sanctions in Monaco: development of the website for freezing funds

Nice to meet you, Mathieu! So you're one of the developers who created the site for managing the freezing of funds for the Government of Monaco . Can you explain your role in the development of the site?

Hello Alisée. As a back-end developer on this project, I had to work on the structure of the site and all the functions around it. Newsletter, automated validation workflow, processing and sending data to the front office, etc. It's a complete package! A complete package!

Yes, it was! Can you tell us more about the main objectives that were
required?

The main objective was to develop a website with a back office adapted to the business. Let me explain: the back office allows contributors to insert, modify or remove sanctions on the site. But it also (and above all) allows them to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible. In short: to be autonomous.

The measures entered are subject to checks. We have therefore developed a workflow enabling the various groups of contributors to pass on the content to each other and validate it. Validated measures (additions, deletions, modifications) are then automatically linked to a ministerial decision in the back office. The decision itself will be submitted for validation at a later date. The validation workflow was therefore a very important point in this particular case.

The second objective was to set up an API (Application Programming Interface), a set of rules and protocols enabling different applications to communicate and exchange data in a standardised way. This makes ministerial measures and decisions accessible to the public. The aim is for banks and organisations to be able to access new sanctions quickly and receive structured data in the expected format.

Last but not least, the aim was to make the information clear for users, with a fast search engine and adapted, intuitive search filters.

As you can see, this is a very complex web application in terms of automation.

You mention terms like "intuitive" and "easy". But how have you balanced the design of the site so that it meets the requirements of transparency and international compliance, while ensuring that the interface isn't too confusing for visitors?

All the site's complexity is to be found in the back office, because the measures must not be published without being linked to a ministerial decision. Yes, because the workflow is different depending on which body decides on the penalty. There are a lot of subtleties in the workflow, but the interface is very simple.

The question we asked ourselves was "As a user, what should we see on the site? As a user, what should you see on the site?": the list of ministerial decisions in detail, as well as the list of resulting measures and their explanations. As you'll see, the display is pretty straightforward. We've also added a page giving access to our API documentation.

The site for managing measures to freeze funds for the Government of Monaco

To build each workflow, how did you collaborate with stakeholders such as government authorities or sanctions experts?

As developers, we were in contact with the Direction des Services Numériques de Monaco (DSN) and their project manager. The project manager received operational directives from the Direction des Finances et du Trésor (DFT).
When we were designing the site, we realised that the core business was very complex.

We therefore rethought and proposed a number of improvements that were not necessarily expected, but which we felt were necessary.

To give you an example, we have automated the workflow and the newsletter (it is now created and sent each time a ministerial decision is published).

How do you manage the regular updates and maintenance of the site to ensure that it stays up to date with new regulations and sanctions?

We have made the DFT contributors independent thanks to the back office developed with Ibexa. First of all, the DFT receives the fund freezing measures and then, thanks to a tool developed in the back office, it can add a large number of new measures quickly and easily. The measures are then submitted for validation and inserted with their corresponding status (withdrawn, added, amended) in the appropriate ministerial decision. But each decision also has its own validation path: in progress, pending, etc.

When the ministerial decision is ready to be signed, we have ensured that we can generate the document for the Minister of State to sign. An attached XLS document is also
is also generated. These documents can then be downloaded to the front office.
Once the ministerial decision has been signed and published, a newsletter is automatically sent to all registered users. As I was saying, it keeps them up to date with the latest measures taken by the government.

Interview by Alisée, Digital Development and Events Manager at
Inforca, with Mathieu, Web Application Developer specialising in the back-end at Inforca.