For the purposes of AML, it’s a lot more useful to know who is transacting than the amount that’s being transacted, yet most AML system alerts are built around the latter.Combining internal, publicly available and transactional data, you can complete a full picture for investigators to make a decision on whether something truly looks suspicious.
If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably seen the deluge of headlines surrounding financial fraud and money laundering. Whether it’s Newsweek’s parent company and Danske Bank being charged or Canada, United Arab Emirates and Turkey cracking down on suspicious activity, it’s clear traditional anti-money laundering (AML) strategies aren’t cutting it and there’s a want as well as pressure to do better.
AML systems have traditionally been built piece by piece, essentially copying one approach for different lines of business (retail, corporate, correspondent, trade, markets, etc). This is done after the fact and responds only to a very limited set of behaviors relating to a single incident. This piecemealing complicates the monitoring process by introducing a range of overly simplistic, siloed solutions that can’t help spot new patterns or behaviors, but can only respond to specific triggers. By the time the news stories are circulated detailing the financial crime incident, criminals have already started to change their behaviors to remain under the radar or moved their activity to a new target bank that has adopted similar controls.
Not only is this approach ineffective at recognizing and stopping financial crime threats, it’s also creates a surprising number of false positives – 90 to 95 percent. With such narrow behavior parameters, normal day-to-day activities get flagged as potential crime and analysts are required by law to investigate every alert, no matter how credible. Banks keep throwing more budget and more bodies at the problem, but are still stung by millions of dollars in fines every year and still inadvertently facilitate money laundering transactions equivalent to 2 to 5 percent of global GDP.
What’s missing from current approaches to AML? Context.
For the purposes of AML, it’s a lot more useful to know who is transacting than the amount that’s being transacted, yet most AML system alerts are built around the latter. Anyone can transact in high volume or frequency (both of which would raise red flags) so that information is only useful when combined with outside knowledge about that entity. If they have common connections with people on the terrorist watch list, that’s going to be worth taking a closer look at versus someone interacting with regular business associates.
Combining internal, publicly available and transactional data, you can complete a full picture for investigators to make a decision on whether something looks suspicious, in significantly less time. If this full picture of activity and context is used in the detection and analytical processes, it effectively combines human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI). This in turn creates context and makes it much easier to detect activity, reduce false positives, and more quickly escalate the number of real incidents that are captured.
Thanks to AI, it is now possible to look for hidden relationships that could reveal nefarious activity and guiding this process by incorporating human intelligence into the analytical streams. AI can pour through more data faster than its human counterparts, making it possible for banks to find out more about criminal networks than ever before. Transactions leave a data footprint, and analytics can start to paint a picture of what criminals are up to – the ultimate goal to be able to map this activity in near real time.
Already, AI augmentation of the traditional AML process has improved efficiency, reducing false positives by over 98 percent and increasing the number of real incidents detected that went completely missed by old systems. This alone has saved millions of dollars in compliance costs and potential fines. With an increased focus on cracking down on financial crime and holding banks and executives accountable for financial crime, institutions can ill afford to stick to the status quo.
The world is a series of relationships, why not model that information? With investments in AI this is becoming possible. Financial institutions can now move from monitoring to being at the heart of disrupting financial crime and the nefarious activities and industries it underpins.
You may be interested in…

Why You Need A Holistic View of Integrity Risks Within The Supply Chain
Businesses that support organizations through their supply chain face a growing number of risks. Learn how Decision Intelligence can help.

How to Achieve Growth & Manage Risk with Real-Time Customer Insights
Discover how forward-thinking organizations are deploying new technologies to create a dynamic, contextual understanding of their customers.

The Quantexa Community: Where Customers and Partners Can Learn, Share and Collaborate
Find out more about The Quantexa Community, a global professional network built to bring Quantexa users together.

Quantexa Opens State-of-the-Art Technology & Analytics Hub in Malaga
Quantexa has opened the doors to its Technology & Analytics Hub, set in the very heart of Malaga’s thriving Tech Park. Learn more today.

It’s Time To Upgrade Your Early Warning Signal Systems – Here’s How
Find out why risk managers are turning to CDI technology to provide more accurate early warning signals that anticipate risk changes earlier.

How to Build Additional Context into Your Machine Learning Algorithm
Learn how building additional context into your machine learning algorithm can help your organization detect risks at speed.
Related Solutions

Tax Authorities
Reduce the tax gap, identify fraud and non-compliance, and operate as efficiently as possible with limited resources.

Anti-money laundering
Reveal hidden risks and detect criminal activity faster. Reduce false positives to manage the cost of compliance. And improve investigations to make faster and more consistent decisions at scale.

Customs Agencies & Border Control
Contextual Decision Intelligence enables faster decisions, increased revenue collection and enhanced compliance. The Quantexa platform enables Customs and Border agency teams to analyze data successfully, automate and accelerate decision-making, and achieve improved results.

Fraud
Identify potentially fraudulent activity by looking at people or transactions in isolation. Understand the context surrounding the organizations you do business with to make fast, accurate decisions.

Fraud, Waste & Abuse
Empower your team with the best tools available for today’s challenges to identify and prevent fraud, waste and abuse with contextual decision intelligence software.

Credit Risk
Understand your customers, their business structures and supply chains. Make better lending decisions, faster. And support digital risk transformation.

Customer Intelligence
Generate a complete view of the context around your customers and prospects to build better relationships, reduce attrition and find hidden opportunities.

Revolutionize Your Financial Crime and Fraud Detection

Investigations
Enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and consistency of your operational and complex investigations to empower your teams to expose and understand risk faster.

Master Data Management
Connect all data—internal and third party—to create a joined-up, contextual view of all the relationships between your customers and every other domain.

Compliance
See how we help to reduce costs and improve coverage for financial crime compliance.

CDO
See how our platform uses contextual analysis to turn data into a high value asset.

CIO
See how our platform uses financial crime technology to enhance your existing IT ecosystem.

Healthcare
Reduce the tax gap, identify fraud and non-compliance, and operate as efficiently as possible with limited resources.

Contextual Monitoring
Reveal hidden risks and detect criminal activity faster. Reduce false positives to manage the cost of compliance. And improve investigations to make faster and more consistent decisions at scale.

Unified CRM Solution

Know Your Customer
Reduce significant manual effort across onboarding, refreshes and remediation. Automate checks, implement continuous monitoring, and focus on contextual decision making.

Growth and Retention

Contextual Engagement
Generate a complete view of the context around your customers and prospects to build better relationships, reduce attrition and find hidden opportunities.

Data Management
Connect all data—internal and third party—to create a joined-up, contextual view of all the relationships between your customers and every other domain.

Connected Customer View
Generate a complete view of the context around your customers and prospects to build better relationships, reduce attrition and find hidden opportunities.