We at SymphonyAI recently set an industry-changing event in motion.
Our acquisition of financial crime detection leader NetReveal from BAE Systems is a momentous leap forward in our journey to becoming the leading enterprise AI company offering business AI applications. Even more importantly, it will advance the approach to fighting financial crime.
The combination of NetReveal’s expertise in managing regulatory compliance, risk, fraud, financial crime detection, investigations, and reporting with the innovative capabilities of our AI-based Sensa is a transformative event in the financial crime and risk detection landscape.
Together, this portfolio of AI-powered solutions, products, and technologies will uncover more criminal activity than rules engines alone can capture while also reducing false positives in crime detection that are currently overwhelming investigators and regulators. Moreover, Sensa generates information that NetReveal can use to gain insights into identifying new crimes and trends. This feedback loop delivers real, increasing value.
Particularly since 9-11, banks have used rules-based systems to discover and fight financial crime. These systems rely on banking transactions and customer and account data to identify potential issues, including fraud. While they can be effective, the rules are looking for yesterday’s crimes when sophisticated bad actors have quickly moved on, concocted new schemes, and are finding new ways to fool the systems designed to catch them. Financial institutions are falling behind on the innovation curve and need to catch up — and get ahead — fast.
SymphonyAI can now devote significant firepower to this particular problem. “AI changes this operational process dramatically by looking for new and evolving patterns and behaviors for which rules don’t yet exist,” our CEO, Sanjay Dhawan, told AI Magazine. “In other words, AI is looking for fraud and crime we can’t yet see.”
Through AI-based analysis of banking data, Sensa detects crime over 80 times more accurately than previous approaches, increases suspicious activity reports that banks use to flag transactions by more than 260 percent, and produces around 75 percent fewer false positives. NetReveal brings best-in-class case management and a host of other solutions along with more than 700 subject matter experts and a large, global customer base.
AI for process improvement
Dhawan used the term “pervasive usefulness” to describe how he envisions AI seamlessly facilitating countless business operations and processes that now depend on pen and paper or outdated spreadsheets. To delve as deeply as possible into specific business operations, we create vertical solutions designed to solve specific challenges in specific industries, as opposed to a generalized platform. Our solutions are integrated into our customers’ workflows – they aren’t altering workflows to adapt to our solutions.
As a result, SymphonyAI solutions quickly unlock value, operational efficiencies, and business process innovations. In the case of financial crime and risk detection, the NetReveal acquisition promises multiple major improvements for SymphonyAI customers.
- Visualization: AI is only useful if people can understand it. SymphonyAI now offers the most transparent solution with intuitive visualizations, making it easy for professionals to quickly understand and see patterns that warrant scrutiny. Effective visualization tools help integrate insights into daily workflows.
- Explainability: Understanding why the software is flagging a transaction is critical. The rate of false positives for financial institutions seeking out crime can reach more than 90 percent, according to IBM. Quickly separating the wheat from the chaff is a significant efficiency booster.
- Comfort and familiarity among regulators: The more explainable and transparent AI is, the more familiar and comfortable users, banks, and regulators will become. As regulators better understand AI, its use will become more widespread, and its benefits will multiply.
- Improved operations in combatting financial crime: The flywheel effect of enterprise AI helping professionals analyze new crimes and create new responses gives law enforcement new tools to ID and pursue bad actors.
We expect SymphonyAI solutions to become more valuable in the future as banks and other businesses demand the highest levels of security. As Bloomberg reported, the NetReveal acquisition will come as demand for financial crime and risk detection remains likely to increase amid unstable financial and economic conditions and as financial technologies like digital payments and cryptocurrencies evolve. The timing is not coincidental. We deploy enterprise AI to satisfy the demands of businesses. Today, more of them need help identifying and preventing financial crime.
