The financial crime prevention solution helps SymphonyAI win the Microsoft 2024 Partner of the Year for AI Innovation
SymphonyAI is the Microsoft 2024 Partner of the Year for AI Innovation. Microsoft bestowing this recognition on SymphonyAI shows just how impressive the company’s use of technology has been. This is most keenly seen in Sensa Investigation Hub, a cutting-edge AI-powered application from SymphonyAI’s financial services division, which allows for an enterprise-wide view of financial crime risk together with gen AI powered investigation tools.
What is the AI Innovation award?
The AI Innovation award is part of the Business Transformation category. A brand new global award for 2024, it highlights the company that is transforming businesses through its innovative AI applications. The judging criteria focuses on the organization that has the most successful implementation of AI and how it is driving significant impact for customers using it.
In Microsoft’s own words, ‘the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards acknowledge outstanding successes and innovations by partners in over 100 countries and in a wide variety of categories and industries, including cloud to edge technologies, entrepreneurial spirit and social impact.’
Recent winners across other categories include Capgemini, EY, PwC, WPP, Tata Consultancy Services, and Dell.
Innovative AI providing business transformation in financial services
Banks and other financial services organizations are required by law to review all financial transactions and report any suspicious activities (money laundering, sanctions evasion, payment fraud, etc.) to regulators and law enforcement. They do this using AML tools, screening software, and fraud prevention solutions.
Financial transactions are growing every year with more than 3.6 billion people expected to use online banking alone in 2024, which is up from 2.4 billion in 2020 – a 50+% increase. The costs to investigate potential financial crimes are significant and growing; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that financial crimes, including money laundering, account for 2–5% of global GDP each year, which is between $800 billion and $2 trillion.
Alongside this, because traditional AML tools and customer onboarding systems are rules-based, they generate many false positives – up to 97% of all alerts. This adds up to a multi-billion-dollar expense in wasted investigator time across all financial organizations. With online banking increasing, so too does the workload. Banks cannot simply continue to add more resources. Sensa Investigation Hub provides a solution to this problem.
How Sensa Investigation Hub innovates with AI
AI innovation begins from the ground up. SymphonyAI wanted to meet the concerns of large enterprises and organizations, understanding how to combat their most pressing difficulties with financial crime software. It became clear that the solution was Sensa Investigation Hub, helping businesses get the most out of their sanctions screening, fraud prevention solutions, AML tools, and KYC/CDD processes.
Sensa Investigation Hub runs on Microsoft’s Azure platform and provides organizations with an enterprise-wide view of financial crime risk management. It helps investigators work more efficiently by accelerating investigations with a generative AI assistant, the Sensa Copilot, which sources, summarizes, and analyzes data at scale.
Combined with predictive AI detection models, Sensa reduces false positives by up to 70%, improves the risk-alert ratio by up to 81x, and detects up to 30% more risks that merit a suspicious activity report (SAR), a fantastic example of AI innovation for financial services.
Microsoft technology powering AI innovation
Creating innovative AI products requires advanced technology on the backend. Sensa Investigation Hub natively runs on Microsoft Azure and is powered by SymphonyAI’s Eureka predictive and generative AI architecture. Eureka uses multiple Microsoft technologies, such as Azure OpenAI, Search, and Azure API Management.
Like all predictive and generative SymphonyAI applications, the Sensa Copilot follows responsible AI principles by offering full transparency and explainability. Azure OpenAI and API Management helps ensure data privacy and customer safety, with data security at rest and on the network, native support for cloud, hybrid, or on-prem operations, and seamless integration with Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Additionally, Eureka uses a lake house architecture with secure petabyte-scale structured and unstructured data management and governance, as well as a single source of data for machine learning. Built-in authentication and access control at data and API layers confirm data doesn’t reach large language models (LLMs) without permission.
The future of AI innovation
Becoming Microsoft 2024 Partner of the Year for AI Innovation is a fantastic accomplishment, building on recent successes as RegTech of the Year at the FinTech Awards London and being selected in the AI FinTech 100. It highlights the quality of the SymphonyAI fincrime prevention product offering – from name screening to AML tools – and the innovations that everybody at the company has helped to build. Even so, there is still a lot more to come from SymphonyAI divisions—not just financial services, but also retail/CPG, industrial, media, and enterprise IT. There is also more to come from the Sensa Investigation Hub and other innovative AI solutions such as the recently launched augmentations: enhancing sanctions screening with SensaAI for Sanctions, taking AML solutions to the next level with SensaAI for AML, and entity resolution.
Want to learn more about how SymphonyAI is building the next generation of products to fight financial crime? Check out what’s new at financial services for all the latest developments.
