Accuity, the leading provider of financial crime compliance, payments, and Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, has announced its AI-driven account screening capability, ‘Firco Automated Alert Reduction’, which increases the level of accuracy in detecting and evaluating screening matches during the KYC process.
It has also been optimised to integrate seamlessly with WorldCompliance™ data to expand its visibility into sanctions, politically exposed person (PEP) and adverse media lists, in support of compliance requirements.
This new module augments existing financial crime filters and alleviates a significant burden for organisations with large-scale compliance operations that rely heavily on human operators to review potential risks. Risks associated with customer accounts can include exposure to illicit financial activity, sanctioned entities, PEPs and reputationally exposed persons (REPs).
Existing matching technology compares customer data to the entities listed on regulatory watch lists, but until now, has not been sophisticated enough to eliminate the abundance of ‘false positive’ results produced, with the necessary level of accuracy. Manually assessing alerts to determine quality, potential risk, and whether further investigation is required, has been a significant drain on compliance resources and a contributor to the rising costs of compliance across the industry.
According to the recent Chartis Research Financial Crime Risk Management Systems: AML and Watchlist Monitoring report, “the success of an AML system is usually measured by the amount of time it saves and its reduction of false positives.”
Firco Automated Alert Reduction applies AI techniques to the hundreds of thousands of potential matches produced by a financial crime screening system. Its patented scoring methodology calculates the probability that a match is correct and evaluates how material the risk is to the business. The most relevant hits are flagged for immediate attention, based on the organisation’s individual risk appetite and compliance policy. Results are fed back into the screening cycle continuously, allowing the statistical model to adapt and become more intelligent as it gathers information.
Sophie Lagouanelle, Vice President of Financial Crime Screening at Accuity said, “Sifting through screening matches to detect the true risks can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Not only does our solution considerably reduce the size of that haystack to expose risks with unparalleled precision, but it also intelligently prioritises those risks according to the organisation’s compliance policy, so operators can be far more methodical in their approach to reviewing hits.”
Firco Automated Alert Reduction greatly improves the effectiveness of screening and provides significant efficiency gains to clients. It also records an electronic audit trail so screening results and the decision-making process can be shared easily with regulators. For instance, the NYDFS Part 504 rule means that for obliged entities, explainability is more important than ever.
This regulation stipulates that financial institutions and payment service providers must be able to demonstrate their financial crime screening programme is fit for purpose, that they can control their software, and that the results of screening correspond to the organisation’s risk appetite.