Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to reshape the financial landscape, promising to change the way we work, communicate and innovate at every operational level.
One of the most exciting compliance applications of GenAI is in the screening process, where AI innovations are enabling users to unlock the power of customer risk data. However, while GenAI is delivering benefits, it is also being used maliciously, with tech-forward criminals deploying AI tools to increase the effectiveness of money laundering schemes. In the most pernicious cases, criminals exploit GenAI to produce highly convincing counterfeit content, such as images, official documents, and even cloned voices, which allow them to bypass compliance controls and abuse the financial system.
In the face of that threat, financial institutions must understand the potential of GenAI to not only keep pace with criminals, but to become a compliance game-changer.
AML Screening: GenAI Compliance Possibilities
GenAI technology may not be suitable for every type of anti-financial crime (AFC) task, but delivers specific advantages for anti-money laundering (AML) screening solutions. GenAI tools can be integrated simply within existing frameworks, and quickly applied to a firm’s data analysis burden. The power of GenAI lies in its capability to supercharge critical screening tasks, such as customer name searches, by automatically unpicking the detail of structured and unstructured data, and delivering actionable financial intelligence in seconds.
So what are some of the possibilities of GenAI tools for AML screening?
Automation of Routine Tasks
Software automation has enhanced the speed and accuracy of critical compliance tasks across the board, but the potential of GenAI goes beyond process-efficiency. GenAI tools can automatically identify, distil, and extract meaning from seemingly-unconnected, unstructured data points, such as news stories, to build in-depth customer risk profiles or output concise prose summaries of an individual’s AML risk that inform and streamline compliance decision-making.
In fact, GenAI tools are useful for summarising a range of AML data sets, including suspicious activity reports (SAR). Deployed effectively, they can eliminate the need for manual input during the compliance process, and free up human employees to apply their skills and expertise to more value-adding tasks.
Enhanced Risk Investigations
AI tools can serve a multitude of purposes in an AML programme but are often particularly useful in risk investigations. AI-enabled analytics software, for example, can identify specific information and connections within vast, unstructured data sets that human observers may have missed – but that may change a customer’s risk profile considerably.
GenAI can push investigative possibilities even further by automatically finding, analysing and summarising data within relevant documents and online sources, including PDFs, watchlists, news stories, and social media pages. That capability promises to not only save time during the screening process but hone the focus of the investigation so that analysts can target their questions more specifically, and refine their investigative techniques.
Quality Assurance
Firms may choose to turn the focus of their GenAI analytics inwards to identify weaknesses within their screening process, opportunities to strengthen, or points at which targeted training and development may have greater impact.
This type of quality assurance (QA) application may have an end-goal of verifying completed investigations but GenAI tools could also be programmed to intervene at progressive stages to examine specific alerts, and determine whether analysts made the right decisions. After enough affirmation, and with sufficient corporate confidence, the GenAI QA process could be reversed, with AI tools completing investigations and human compliance analysts verifying their outputs.
Top 5 Ways GenAI Can Support Your Compliance Team
Enhance AML screening and automate manual tasks
In a complex regulatory environment, GenAI can streamline and simplify AML customer screening to deliver better compliance outcomes.
Generate investigative insight
GenAI tools can focus and deepen risk investigations by providing valuable data insight that human compliance teams often miss.
Continuously improve
Use GenAI to address weaknesses in your AML screening process and verify critical compliance decisions.
Reduce false positives
GenAI tools can identify and extract the most relevant risk data to build accurate customer profiles and reduce costly false positive alerts.
Make faster decisions
Use GenAI language models to create concise summaries of customer risk data, and facilitate stronger decision-making during screening.
Cutting-Edge Screening Power
As global financial compliance grows increasingly complex, GenAI tools have the potential to fundamentally change AML screening outcomes, providing enhanced screening accuracy and efficiency, and a greater depth of understanding for compliance teams.
GenAI is already delivering AML results in the real world. Ripjar’s AI Risk Profiles feature within the Labyrinth Screening platform uses machine learning technology to resolve vast amounts of unstructured risk data around a single customer profile, extracting only the most relevant information to maximise efficiency and avoid false positives. Labyrinth also includes AI Summaries, a GenAI-powered language model that adds clear, concise prose descriptions of customer risk to each profile in order to help compliance teams make faster, stronger decisions during the screening process.
Labyrinth Screening is further boosted by Ripjar’s Compliance Copilot, a GenAI-powered assistant that can support compliance teams by acting as a first line of defence in reviewing alerts and carrying out assessments.
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