Financial crimes are a threat to just about every business on the planet, no matter their size, history, or industry they are in. There are many types of financial crime that range from fraud to money laundering, insider trading, cybercrime, and many others.
They cost companies a lot of money, can be frustrating to deal with, and can often ruin the reputation of a company in some situations. As a result, companies are doing all they can to protect themselves.
Whether you use a tool like X-Sight by Nice Actimize or come up with your own solution, the battle against financial crime is an important one. While there are many ways that companies fight this issue, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a favorite.
But how can AI and analytics protect your company?
Well, that is exactly what this article is going to take a closer look at. Keep reading to learn a little more about protecting your company from financial crime with AI.
Work Much Quicker and More Efficiently
The first major benefit of using AI in your fight against financial crime is that it can work much quicker and more efficiently than traditional means. Having to manually monitor the various risk alerts that come in simply isn’t sustainable in most cases.
Not only will it take a huge team a ton of time, but there is always a chance that a risk alert is missed or not resolved properly. Instead, AI can automate these processes to ensure that all risk alerts are handled properly, without a ton of wasted time or mistakes. This saves a ton of time and frees up your employees to focus on more pressing matters.
Detect More Specific and Complex Risk
Using AI also allows companies to detect more specific and complex risks that older and more traditional processes might have missed. Today, bad actors are becoming much more sophisticated in their efforts and are using tactics many businesses have never seen or had to deal with before.
There are various patterns being used that companies simply don’t identify until it’s too late, as they haven’t been on their radar in the past. Many companies also have processes in place that are only capable of detecting known or existing risks and scenarios, not new ones.
By using the most recent AI technologies, you can ensure you are prepared for whatever these fraudsters or criminals might throw your way. These tools are capable of identifying more complex patterns or behaviors, and can often even learn on the fly.
Reduce False Positives
A major issue that many companies may struggle with in their fight against financial crimes is false positives. A false positive is essentially when an alert comes through that indicates something malicious is occurring, only for it to end up not being true.
These false positives can waste a lot of time and energy, and end up hurting your overall efficiency. Not only that, but a false positive can often distract a company from an actual issue that ends up being missed.
By using AI and analytics tools, you can reduce the likelihood of false positives occurring and wasting company time and resources. There are many reasons for this such as AI tools being better at screening customers, analyzing data, and making sure the data is structured correctly.
Prediction and Pattern Recognition
Oftentimes, a big part of protecting your firm from financial crimes is recognizing problematic patterns or behaviors. Successfully detecting fraud and other crimes often comes down to how quickly it can be recognized and dealt with before something catastrophic occurs.
Unfortunately, trying to sift through a ton of unstructured data manually to identify different patterns to make predictions based on is next to impossible. It would take a lot of time, effort, and likely a team of employees. This simply isn’t realistic for many companies. Instead, many businesses will use AI.
AI tools will be able to easily identify patterns based on past behavior, and flag suspicious activity before it has the chance to advance any further. Not only that, but they can often identify them incredibly quickly and keep up with the various changes to these patterns over time.
Improve Your KYC Process
Within many financial institutions and similar businesses, there are KYC (know your client or know your customer) standards in place. These are here primarily to protect these businesses from fraud and various other kinds of financial crime.
KYC is all about verifying that a customer really is who they say they are. Many fraudsters prefer to hide their identity, so having KYC protocols in place, drives some criminals away. Unfortunately, despite the KYC protocols being in place, financial crimes are still prevalent.
The way that AI can help with the KYC program within your business is that it can use a ton of accessible data points to gather important insights about customers and clients, to detect any possible suspicions or crimes.
AI can utilize the vast amount of open-source data out in the world to learn more about people (even those who are trying to hide in the shadows), in ways that a manual check or research simply couldn’t.
Reduce Your Costs
While not a specific way that AI helps protect your company, we felt that this was also very important to mention. Companies spend a ton of money on fighting financial crime, but this doesn’t have to be the case if you rely on AI to help.
AI solutions for fighting financial crime are often relatively affordable and cost considerably less to use over time than having to hire an entire team to monitor or catch suspicious activity. A big reason that AI can reduce the costs associated with fighting financial crime is because of automation.
Many tasks and processes that used to be handled primarily by individuals can now be taken on by software or tools. This frees up a lot of time, reduces errors, and generally gives a boost to your efficiency company-wide.
So not only can AI be more effective when it comes to protecting your business from things like money laundering, theft, and fraud, but it can also help you attack these issues more affordably.
Of course, in order to save the most, you need to ensure that the solutions you opt to go with are compatible with both your needs and your business.
Conclusion
In conclusion, here are a few of the many ways that AI and analytics can help keep your company safe from financial crime. AI is still in its relative infancy, so expect many more use cases for it in the future.
