The cost of financial crime is estimated to represent about 5 percent of the global GDP, a significant burden on the economy and an enormous impact on people and organizations. Financial crimes such as money laundering and fraud are linked to human trafficking, child exploitation, terrorism, theft, and wildlife trafficking. To tackle this, banks and other financial institutions maintain large teams of financial investigators and systems to detect, assess, and report crime. Solutions that can improve the efficiency and accuracy of detecting money laundering can help fight crime and significantly affect our world.
“For financial institutions, the need to invest in financial crime management is both mandated—through compliance obligations driven by regulation—and strategic,” says Sarah Smith, Head of Product Marketing at the Sensa-NetReveal division of SymphonyAI. “Strong risk assessment helps prevent financial crime, reduces losses, and supports a healthy financial ecosystem. The hard part is the cost of doing this. The value of prevention is hard to calculate, whereas the cost of prevention scales as the bank grows, and risk rises.”
That’s where SymphonyAI has the potential to transform the industry by integrating AI algorithms and machine learning models to find areas of previously undetected risk and to help investigators do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.
“We expect that investigations can be completed 60 to 70 percent faster, with 70 percent less effort on the part of the human investigator. That is a transformational shift in financial crime investigation.”
Eve Whittaker, Solutions Consultant, SymphonyAI
Using generative AI to address the problem
SymphonyAI is a leading enterprise AI software company that provides high-value solutions for digital transformation across a range of verticals. Its AI-powered applications are designed to meet the unique needs of businesses across a range of industries, including retail, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, media, IT/enterprise service management, and financial services. In financial services, SymphonyAI offers a portfolio of products to help banks detect crime, and to help financial investigators do their jobs more effectively.
“Understanding the potential of AI means understanding the strengths and power of differing AI models and approaches,” explains Eve Whittaker, a Sensa-NetReveal Solutions Consultant at SymphonyAI. “SymphonyAI’s products use supervised and unsupervised machine learning to detect previously undetected risk and crime, and new generative AI capabilities that empower investigators to do their jobs even better. This combination drives efficient and effective financial crime management, reducing the opportunity for criminal profit, and helps a bank manage costs to support sustainable growth.”
SymphonyAI’s new Sensa Copilot, introduced in May 2023, incorporates Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to uniquely combat financial crime. It acts as a sophisticated AI assistant to a financial crime investigator by automatically collecting, collating, and summarizing financial and third-party information. Its use of Azure OpenAI has made the product transformational in delivering even more value to customers by identifying behaviors associated with money laundering activity and helping investigators analyze those activities as quickly and efficiently as possible. When an alert comes in, the investigator can use the Sensa Copilot’s natural language interface to run analyses, explore various data sources, and probe further to determine whether that alert is suspicious. If the investigator determines the alert points to suspicious behavior, they can use the Sensa Copilot to automatically summarize key risk factors and draft a suspicious activity report (SAR).
Fighting against fraud
A cloud-first approach is key to SymphonyAI’s success. Microsoft Azure provides a highly secure platform, global scale, and the confidence customers need in their cloud provider. Azure is at the forefront of AI transformation, helping SymphonyAI to innovate faster.
The Sensa Copilot for financial crime prevention is built on Azure infrastructure, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure AI solutions, and Azure OpenAI. The AI-based criminal discovery techniques of the SymphonyAI Sensa-NetReveal platform, combined with the generative AI–based Sensa Copilot, offer a needed advantage to fraud and financial crime units.
A fraud-free future
While Sensa-NetReveal is already a category leader in transaction monitoring,[1] the Sensa Copilot increased the productivity of a financial institution’s compliance department by ~60 percent in early testing states. The significance of this is best illustrated by understanding the daily volume of alerts banks are dealing with.
“Large financial institutions get thousands or tens of thousands of alerts from various systems in a month, and the number of alerts continues to grow,” notes Whittaker. “With heightened regulations and rising alert volumes, it’s going to be critical that investigators are empowered to keep up. The Sensa Copilot will make this possible—we expect that investigations can be completed 60 to 70 percent faster, with 70 percent less effort on the part of the human investigator. That is a transformational shift in financial crime investigation.
The SymphonyAI software will be used first within anti-money laundering and fraud investigation units within global financial institutions. The goal is to expand the capabilities of its existing AI solutions and provide even greater value to its customers.
SymphonyAI has made a $100 million investment commitment over the next three years in generative AI for product development of its vertical applications across industries. With Azure OpenAI, SymphonyAI is accelerating product development with advanced AI capabilities across its portfolio. The partnership between SymphonyAI and Microsoft is poised to transform industries and help businesses create a fraud-free future.
“Our mission, together with Microsoft, is to provide valuable AI applications to businesses, and in this case, to work together in partnership to create a fraud-free future.”
Kumar Abhimanyu, Senior Vice President & Global Head of Strategic Partnerships, SymphonyAI
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