Financial Services compliance departments are constantly turning to technology to find efficiencies and satisfy increasingly tough regulatory examinations. It started with simple robotics, which can provide great operational efficiencies and help standardize processes. Never ones to rest on their laurels, compliance departments have begun looking to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the next technological step to enhance and improve their programs. PayPal has cut its fraud false alerts in half by using an AI monitoring system that can identify benign reasons for seemingly bad behavior. HSBC recently announced a partnership to use AI in its Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program. Despite the adoption by some large players, there is still a lot of hesitancy and concern about the use of AI in financial crimes compliance.
WHAT IS AI AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
AI is computer software that can make decisions normally made by a human. What does this mean? In essence this means that it is computer software that can analyze large amounts of data and use patterns and connections within that data to reach certain results about that data.
Just like people, AI needs to learn in order to make decisions. It can do this in two ways: supervised or unsupervised learning. Supervised is the most common method, whereby data, the goal, and the expected output of that data are provided to the software allowing it to identify algorithms to get to the expected result. Supervised learning allows AI to use a feedback loop to further refine its intended task. If it identifies potential fraud, that turns out not to be, it can incorporate that feedback and uses it for future evaluation.
Unsupervised learning provides the software with only the data and the goal, but with no expected output. This is more complex and allows the AI to identify previously unknown results. As the software gets more data, it continues to refine its algorithm, becoming increasingly more efficient at its task.
HOW CAN IT HELP IN FINANCIAL CRIMES COMPLIANCE?
While there are varied uses in this space, one of the most relevant is to monitor transactions for potential criminal activity. Instead of using rule-based monitoring that looks for very specific red flag activity, AI software can use a large amount of data to filter out false alerts and identify complex criminal conduct. It can rule out false positives by identifying innocuous reasons for certain activity (investigation that normally needs to be done by an analyst) or see connections and patterns that are too complex to be picked up by straight forward rule-based monitoring. The reason it is able to do this is that AI software acts fluidly and can identify connections between data points that a human cannot. Its ability to analyze transactions for financial crime is only limited by the data available to it. Some specific uses are:
Fraud Identification: Identifying complex fraud patterns and cutting down on the number of false alerts by adding other data (geolocation tagging, IP addresses, phone numbers, usage patterns, etc.). See Paypals success in the first paragraph.
AML Transaction Monitoring and Sanctions Screening: Similar to fraud identification, it can greatly reduce the amount of false alerts by taking into account more data. It can also identify complex criminal activity occurring across products, lines of business, and customers.
Know Your Customer: Linkage detection between accounts, customers, and related parties to fully understand the risk of a party to the bank. Also, through analysis of unstructured data it can identify difficult to identify relevant negative news.
Anti-Bribery, Insider Trading, and Corruption: It can be used to identify insider trading or bribery by analyzing multiple source of information including emails, phone calls, messaging, expense reports, etc.
ANY CONCERNS?
Seems amazing, right? You might be wondering why everyone isnt immediately implementing these solutions throughout their financial crime compliance programs. While there have been some early adopters, there is still a lot of hesitation to use AI in the Financial Crime compliance space due to the highly regulated nature of the field. There is no doubt that AI will bring a huge lift in the future, but here are some of the concerns that need to be ironed out before we see large scale adoption:
Black box image of AI decisioning
By using more data than a human could synthesize, it may select patterns and results that wouldnt necessarily make sense to a person. As a result, AI providers need to ensure that AI derived decisions are supported by an auditable rationale that is clear to person. Clear documentation around how the AI gets to its results will be necessary.
Algorithmic Bias
Because AI software functions are based on the data it is provided, the impact of misinformation or biased information could be very large. This can occur when unintentional bias within the source data and training is uploaded into the algorithms the AI uses to perform its task. No one wants to end up with an AI transaction monitoring system that is flagging transactions based on racial or nationality bias.
Lack of regulatory acceptance
Currently, there appears to be a lack of regulatory acceptance mostly due to the first two concerns described above. That being said, in the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority are both working on limited use of AI in their organizations. This is a strong step in having them able to understand and test it.
WHAT TO DO?
Now you know how AI can help your program and some of the concerns you need to be mindful of, but what now? Here are a couple of next steps you can take to successfully implement AI into your Financial Crime Compliance Program:
Lastly, knowledge is power. Keep researching and make sure you understand the reality of what AI can bring to the table for you and your program.
Go here to see the original:
Artificial Intelligence: The Next Step in Financial Crime Compliance Evolution - Finextra (blog)
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]