An AI-Inspired Strategy to Defeat the Raging White Collar Crime

The human identity is made up from many unique elements, and none define us better than that desire of ours to grow on a consistent basis. This progressive approach, in turn, has already got the world to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a major member of the stated group. The reason why technology enjoys such an esteemed stature among people is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which ushered us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look up close for a second, it will become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and consequentially, kickstarted a tech revolution. Of course, this revolution then went on to scale up the human experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after achieving such a monumental feat, technology will somehow continue to produce the goods. The same has grown increasingly evident over the recent past, and assuming one new fintech-themed development shakes out just like we envision, it will only make that trend bigger and better moving forward.

Google has officially confirmed the release of a brand-new Anti Money Laundering AI (AML AI) solution, which like the name suggests, is designed to help financial institutions conceive a better defense mechanism against instances of money laundering. According to certain reports, the stated product will deliver on its promised value proposition by providing  a consolidated machine learning (ML)-generated customer risk score as an alternative to rules-based transaction alerting. This risk score will be generated using the institution’s transactional patterns, network behavior, and Know Your Customer (KYC) data so to identify groups of high-risk retail and commercial customers. Talk about what separates the solution on a more granular level, we begin from its potential to edge out any current systems that are being used for conducting similar risk detection. Next up, we must dig into AML AI’s low-cost structure. You see, as it is so well-equipped to reduce alert volumes and extend explainable outputs that speed up individual investigations, the solution is able to bring down wasted investigator time quite dramatically, thus also curbing the costs. Another way through which AML AI encourages better protection is rooted in providing auditable results. This openness to an extensive assessment alone triggered a 60% decrease in alert volumes during the solution’s early application. Lastly, the product in question is not just given the means to reduce the actual risk, but it can also crackdown on those highly-prevalent false positives. Such a capability eliminates any need for the institution to initiate extra compliance verification checks.

“Google Cloud’s AML AI has significantly improved HSBC’s AML detection capability. Google’s models are already demonstrating the tremendous potential of machine learning to transform anti-financial crime efforts in the industry at large,” said Jennifer Calvery, Group Head of Financial Crime Risk and Compliance at HSBC. “By enhancing our customer monitoring framework with Google Cloud’s sophisticated AI-based product, we have been able to improve the precision of our financial crime detection and reduce alert volumes meaning less investigation time is spent chasing false leads.”

The importance of such a solution is instantly contextualized once you realize how the amount of money laundered each year is currently estimated to be somewhere around 2-5% of global GDP, loosely translating to a sizeable $2 trillion. Also, with organizations reporting more than four billion transactions per year for sophisticated illicit behavior, the need to spend on risk management technologies is almost non-negotiable. However, AML AI brings that very framework, only more efficient in what it does, while simultaneously staying mindful in regards to your bottom line.

“Google is a pioneer in AI, and now we’re making our tools, technologies, and expertise available to solve one of the biggest and most costly challenges in the financial services industry,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Building on our commitment to bring AI-powered innovation to the financial services industry, we are launching Google Cloud’s AML AI to help financial institutions more accurately and efficiently identify AML risk while enhancing business operations and governance.”