Powering your financial crime compliance
September 19, 2019
September 19, 2019
Financial firms know the struggle they face against financial crime. Accenture’s report indicates financial services providers spent a collective $110 billion1 in their efforts to combat anti-money laundering (AML) and comply with AML requirements.
How can providers be certain their extensive AML investments are wise?
Financial services providers spent a collective $110 billion in their efforts to combat anti-money laundering.
Building a financial crime compliance approach that leverages new age technologies—including artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive automation—is one way to improve investment in crime fighting.
One global institution deployed Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other intelligent automation to revamp its KYC function. Among its gains was an 80 percent drop in commercial client onboarding time. Another global bank achieved a 20 percent drop in alert volumes with no change to its risk appetite.2
A financial crime compliance approach that taps intelligent automation can reap the benefits of smart technologies, such as higher quality investigations, fewer false positives, lower operating costs and higher efficiency overall. Accenture has seen multiple use cases in these areas:
Beginning with KYC, what can financial providers gain from an intelligently automated financial crime compliance? The right technology can build efficiencies into every step of the KYC process, from customer onboarding to due diligence.
Here’s a closer look at how intelligent automation can enhance the KYC function:
Integrating Customer Relationship Management and Customer Lifecycle Management creates operational efficiencies by streamlining KYC case creation.
NLP helps teams identify the screening entity; coreference resolution confirms the entity is properly referenced. Semantic role labeling tags suspects.
Intelligent automation helps identify emerging money laundering patterns, offering a better view of what is a suspicious activity and what is not.
Some low and medium risk alerts can be auto closed or hibernated. If a customer’s activity triggers an alert, it can be re-categorized as high risk.
Traditional alert investigation/transaction monitoring involves an initial review to discount false positive alerts. As needed, this is followed by a detailed review of the customer, with the case referred for additional review if a Suspicious Activity Report is filed with the regulator.
Once again, automation can help, in these ways:
Several challenges might arise when implementing an intelligently automated financial crime compliance. These include addressing regulatory expectations, dealing with legacy systems, and designing an effective policy and governance approach.
We can help address those concerns. Accenture has relationships with numerous vendors who offer expertise and knowledge across the entire AML landscape, including lifecycle management, workflow management, data enrichment, threat identification, entity resolution and visualization of reports using dashboards.
We integrate these capabilities with our in-house tools and services to offer a solution aligned to each financial services provider’s needs. Learn how Accenture can help you automate your financial crime compliance for significant efficiency gains.
1 “Uncover the True Cost of Anti-Money Laundering & KYC Compliance,” LexisNexis, 2016. Access at: https://www.lexisnexis.com/risk/intl/en/resources/research/true-cost-of-aml-compliance-apac-survey-report.pdf. “The True Cost of Anti-Money Laundering Compliance – European Edition,” LexisNexis, September 2017, Access at: https://risk.lexisnexis.com/global/-/media/files/corporations%20and%20non%20profits/research/true%20cost%20of%20aml%
20compliance%20europe%20survey%20report%20.pdf.pdf. “Anti-money laundering compliance costs U.S. financial services firms $25.3 billion per year, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions,” LexisNexis, October 10, 2018. Access at: https://risk.lexisnexis.com/about-us/press-room/press-release/20181010-true-cost-aml.
2 “Standard Chartered teams up with Instabase to automate and optimize client onboarding,” FinanceFeeds. November 7, 2018. Access at: https://financefeeds.com/standard-chartered-teams-instabase-automate-optimise-client-onboarding/. “Anti-Money Laundering and AI at HSBC,” Ayasdi, June 1, 2017. Access at: https://www.ayasdi.com/blog/financial-services/anti-moneylaunderinghsbc/.
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