Looking through the AI Lens to Achieve a More Precise Transaction Monitoring Operation

Although many different factors deserve the credit, one of the biggest reasons why human beings have been able to achieve what they did is rooted in their tendency to improve at a consistent pace. This progressive approach, on our part, has already got the world to hit upon some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a major member from the stated group. Now, technology enjoys such an esteemed stature among people today is, by and large, because of its skill-set, which ushered us towards a reality that nobody could have imagined otherwise. However, 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 right 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.

WorkFusion, a leading provider of AI digital workforce solutions for banking and financial services, has officially announced the launch of a new AI assistant called Isaac, a transaction monitoring investigator. According to certain reports, Isaac will bank upon specialized machine learning capabilities to work first-level alerts, auto-escalate alerts that are likely to require investigation, while simultaneously closing alerts that are deemed as non-suspicious. The idea here, like you can guess, is to empower anti-money laundering analysts in terms of focusing on highest risk activity. Now, to talk about this whole value proposition on a slightly deeper level, we must begin from Isaac’s ability to pick up alerts generated from surveillance monitoring systems. Next up, it must evaluate the alert by collecting all the relevant data before deciding whether to file it away as non-suspicious or escalate it to a dedicated human investigator, who will then perform their own due diligence. Notably enough, the AI assistant can also automate L1 transaction monitoring alert reviews. Anyway, once it has reached a decision regarding the alert’s severity, Isaac will have to create a comprehensive dossier of the same, a dossier which must include human-readable justification, supporting documentation, and a confidence threshold to maintain transparency for examiners and auditors. Another feature enhancing Isaac’s prospects is the way it assists with common AML transaction monitoring scenarios that generate a high volume of alerts such as structuring, excessive funds transfers/movement of funds/patterns of funds transfers, unexpected account usage/behavior, high-risk factors, dormant accounts’ use, and more. Complimenting the entire assortment of features is a consistent approach that the assistant practices when it comes to alert review and investigation, alongside the quality of the alert narrative and supporting documentation.

“Transaction monitoring is a time-consuming and expensive, yet critical component of AML compliance,” said Art Mueller, Vice President of Financial Crime at WorkFusion. “Every day, teams of analysts within banks review large numbers of alerts associated with transactions, patterns or behaviors that flag as potentially suspicious for money laundering or other financial crime. Analysts must determine whether these alerts are false positives, which typically 90-95% are, or truly suspicious activity.”

Founded in 2009, WorkFusion’s rise to prominence stems from its AI assistants, more popularly known as digital workers, tailor-made to fulfill the needs of banking and financial services organizations. Given how these assistants can effectively help you across efforts like anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions, customer onboarding, Know Your Customer (KYC), and customer service, adopting them has shown to instigate benefits like talent shortage resolution, an increase in workers’ productivity, reduction in costs, and an improved customer experience.

“Our new AI Digital Worker, Isaac, reduces the alert review burden by helping to identify which alerts need to be escalated for further review and auto-closes those that it deems as non-suspicious. Because Isaac creates an easy-to-read dossier with a supporting narrative and documentation, analysts move from authors of reports to editors – saving their time to work on higher-risk and higher value investigations,” said Mueller.