QuanCon 2021: Meaningful Data for Trusted Decisions

The Intelligent Enterprise of Now

In these rapidly changing times, it is more important than ever to be able to trust your data and build the context needed for effective operational decision-making across your enterprise. Enterprise risk is profoundly changing and so is the appetite for digitalization. Organizations must be data-driven and new technology, such as Contextual Decision Intelligence, can assist digital transformation and resilience.

In the past year, we have seen more clients putting data at the center of decision intelligence. But, what’s more important, is combining both machine intelligence and human intelligence together.

Vishal Marria, CEO at Quantexa

Context is Everything

Starting off the epic line-up of presentations was Susan Etlinger, Industry Analyst at the Altimeter Group and one of the most respected voices on the ethical use of data. Susan explored the importance of building the foundation for digital leadership in a world with incredible amounts of digital adoption.

As digital transformation continues to accelerate, companies large and small are moving from on-prem systems to the cloud, with a huge explosion in the digitalization of customer interactions. While there has been a tremendous amount of progress in data silo breakages, there remain challenges in how organizations interpret data.

Even the most sophisticated systems and companies can fall victim to context issues that are utterly human and in some sense, utterly predictable.

Susan Etlinger, Industry Analyst at the Altimeter Group

Organizations now have much more data, much of which is unstructured, creating challenges in how we interpret it. So, how can we solve this challenge? In a shifting world, it’s not just about the data, but we need to look at the data in the context of the right methodology, organizational capacity, and data leadership.

Technology is necessary and data is critical, but true value is driven by how organizations use this data in the context of operationalizing processes and driving organizational change. If the issues of flexing methodologies and inconsistent context can be solved, organizations will be able to differentiate themselves and embrace the tremendous opportunities that lie within information quality.

Building a Future-Ready Anti-Financial Crime Program

Scott Nathan, Head of Innovation for AML and Risk, and Michael Raffa, Global Head of AML and Sanctions, at State Street, discussed some of the key challenges facing the bank’s Transaction Monitoring (TM) strategy and how they overcame these using Quantexa’s platform.

With hundreds of millions of static records and transactions, the sheer scale is challenging for many banks. To overcome this, banks must understand their customers by fusing internal with external data to reveal hidden relationships and behaviors – and ultimately, hidden risks. It’s about taking the complexity of data and simplifying it.

Following the implementation of context-driven intelligence, State Street was able to implement modern risk management at a high speed by using an open architecture solution that was responsive to unique products and transactions at the bank. As the financial markets’ threat landscape continues to evolve, State Street’s AML TM strategy has the ability to identify risk faster and make more effective decisions.

Detecting Financial Crime

Robin De Jongh, Managing Director Detecting Financial Crime at ABN AMRO, continued this discussion of making TM more efficient and effective. Fundamental to ensuring trust in the bank whilst maintaining its integrity, is having a high-quality risk categorization of all of its customers. So, how does ABN AMRO detect both the material and technical-compliance risks in these customer portfolios?

Effective TM requires innovation, not only based on old-fashion handwork but involves moving towards innovative data analysis and modeling. As well as using the right technology, successful financial crime detection necessitates collaboration between the public and private sectors. Collaboration enables financial intelligence units to deliver back to public parties, like the police or the fiscal office, on an ongoing basis.

By investing in financial crime technology, ABN AMRO has achieved a 30% reduction in false positives and is now applying its advanced AML anomaly models to detect a wide spectrum of illicit activities including human trafficking, illegal wildlife trade, health care fraud, terrorist financing, and correspondent banking.

The Future of Risk and Compliance

Heather Adams, Managing Director Resilience Risk & Trust at Accenture, discussed the evolution of data and analytics, and how organizations can build the resilience required to unlock the potential of data for effective compliance programs.

With increasing pressures on risk and compliance functions, organizations are beginning to reimagine these functions to be data-centric, focused on the business, customer, and external stakeholder needs. New structures are being built in line with the old, creating data lakes and going digital a lot earlier in the food chain, enabling businesses to become more dynamic.

As well as an emphasis on data, Heather discussed lessons that can be learned from the insurer side. Risk and compliance functions of the future are increasingly focusing on the customer journey.

Banks could learn a lot from insurers, like bringing different elements of the data that you already have internally together, and being more driven by the customer journey. But equally, banks have been pushed a lot harder from a regulatory compliance perspective around things like functions, and there are some things that the insurance industry can learn from the bank too.

Heather Adams, Managing Director, Resilience Risk & Trust at Accenture

Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of controls whilst managing costs, organizations need to have their strategic imperatives in balance, reacting to both internal and external forces: putting data at the center.

Stay at Home, Build Software

Jamie Hutton, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Quantexa took the audience through some recent innovations in the Quantexa platform and plans for the future. Two key streams of development focus on simplification and new investigation capabilities. By investing in huge amounts of automation, the platform is being continually improved for easier deployment, data fusion, and graph scripting. On the other hand, new investigation and research capabilities will provide improved, dynamic, and single customer views.

Better Data, Better Detection, Better Value

From when Quantexa began its journey five years ago to today, the vision has remained the same: to transform the way operational decisions are made with the power of data and analytics technology. QuanCon 2021 explored exactly this: the importance of bridging the gap between data and decision making. Focusing on the change in the world, the event highlighted that by using the right tools and putting the data to work at the core of an organization, a solid foundation can be built for digital resilience and automating accurate decision-making at scale.

On behalf of the entire Quantexa team, thank you to all guest speakers and attendees for helping us make QuanCon 2021 a huge success!