Why Technology Will Be at the Forefront of Fighting Financial Crime

There’s been a lot of talk about the link between technology and the financial sector over the last couple of decades, and the synergy between the two is very obvious at this point. However, technology didn’t just make things easier – it also introduced some new problems. Thankfully, it’s also shaping up as the main answer to the big questions looming on the horizon right now. And from everything we’ve seen so far, there’s no doubt that technology is going to play a key role in keeping the financial market under control in the long term.

Same Story, New Grounds

Financial crime has existed for as long as money has. It still does to this day, but its digital form is a significantly different one from what we’re used to. There are lots of new issues on the horizon, and some of them don’t have a clear answer in the short term. But what we do know is that technology itself is also the best tool for beating these new techniques. Not just because it’s founded in the same area, but because it can directly undermine some of the efforts of financial criminals.

In-depth Analysis

One of the best benefits of technology when it comes to dealing with financial crime is the huge potential it offers for collecting and analyzing data. To a large extent, that’s exactly what financial investigations revolve around – digging through mountains of data to find the link that the criminal didn’t think they’d leave behind. And nowadays, performing this kind of analysis on the level necessary to make it work in the digital world requires significant resources. Artificial intelligence is one of the main sectors within the tech field that are being explored for potential benefits for dealing with financial crime, and for plenty of good reasons.

Proper Preventative Measures

Those same analytical methods can also be used in a variety of other ways, not just for analyzing historic information that’s been gathered over some time. Modern systems can also identify suspicious activity in real time as it’s happening, alerting human operators or simply flagging the account for later review, depending on the severity of the case. This has been of huge help to human analysts who were largely starting to get overburdened with their work in recent years.

Acting Before There’s Even a Problem

On a related note, modern financial systems can often respond to issues before they’ve even fully manifested themselves. That way, criminals are only able to perform one small action within their larger chain before getting compromised. Ultimately, this leads to far less theft and other incidents, because the criminals behind these tricks are never able to fully execute them. And while this does have the uncomfortable disadvantage of occasionally flagging legitimate activities, this is something that’s actively being worked on. In most cases, it doesn’t lead to any long-term issues for affected customers either.

Sharing Information

A major problem in the way of financial institutions’ efforts to deal with crime in the past was the limited range of information they had about one another. It makes sense in the end, as each institution is determined to protecting its own privacy and that of its clients. But in recent years, we’ve started to see this problem tackled in various ways. Organizations are now able to more comfortably share information that could be helpful in tracking down criminal activities, and they can do so without compromising anyone’s right to privacy.

Why Proper Adoption Is Important

This is only going to work if all institutions and players on the market adopt the new changes though. Which, at this rate, looks like it’s going to take some time. But it does at least seem like many companies have started to wise up to the importance of integrating modern tech solutions into their work, and have been doing that more and more actively.

It’s hard to predict how things are going to look just five or ten years from now, but one thing is certain at this point. Those who make an effort to adopt technological advancements now stand to gain a lot later on when it comes to financial security and integration into the market.