The Record - Issue 20: Spring 2021

85 F I NANC I A L S E R V I C E S “As well as creating a mountain of work for financial crime operations and case workers, banks have been looking to cautiously replace legacy financial crime technologies – some which many are amongst the oldest systems in the bank – and to address the siloed nature of the financial crime operations to enhance insights into emerging patterns and to improve productivity,” Nicolay says. This requires a much smarter approach, and far more intelligent systems – especially at a time when customer experience is front and centre. “Banks are keenly aware that additional financial crime controls can negatively impact customer experience,” Nicolay says. “A lot of the careful investment being made will take this into account. Investment is also significant to address risk and to respond to regulatory pressure. Like other ‘net new’ investments, much of this – from a technology perspective – is directed toward cloud-based solutions.” Another key part of the investment has been into artificial intelligence (AI). “Over the past three years, AI has had a noticeable impact on improving financial crime detection and on enhancing case worker productivity,” Nicolay says. “Automatically matching together more data and looking for anomalous behaviour is helping banks and insurers do better at identify- ing transactions or claims that are fraudulent or that require authorities to be notified.” It’s exactly here that solutions from Microsoft and its global partner community are having a huge impact. Microsoft’s cloud platform, for example, ena- bles the ingestion, matching and profiling of customer, transaction and other extended data to support more accurate and faster crime detec- tion. Implementing a cloud-based solution offers a great opportunity to streamline operations by converging bank processes supporting real-time fraud detection and near real-time retrospective transaction monitoring. This not only enhances productivity, but can also result in the develop- ment of more complete shared insights into bad actor patterns. “This is supported by independent software vendor solutions which bring ready-made detec- tion algorithms useful for transaction moni- toring and fraud detection,” Nicolay explains. “Customers may also choose to define their own detection algorithms.”