AML compliance teams need effective user experience and AI detection
If AML professionals get the right software to empower them, they can make financial crime harder and less profitable.
AML compliance teams face a challenging work environment. According to McKinsey, up to 90% of AML suspicious activities flagged to investigators in legacy AML platforms are false positives. A “false positive case” is a case that is identified wrongly as a suspicious transaction that an investigator needs to spend time on. Imagine if 90% percent of incoming projects or messages at your workplace were “false alarms” generated by your email or collaboration software. It would make your work impossible, right?
The staggering scale of money laundering
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the amount of money laundered globally is a whopping USD 2tn or roughly the same as the GDP of Italy. Only 0.1% of illegally gained funds are recovered. Banks worldwide are on track to pay about $2bn in fines for failing to comply with AML rules and regulations in 2021. This figure was “only” $444m in 2019.
Fortunately, the COVID 19 pandemic did not significantly slow official AML investigations. See more on Compliance Week.
AML compliance teams deserve the best software
AML compliance teams need effective detection and superior user experience to beat financial crime. Financial criminals constantly look for new ways to get around banks’ defenses against money laundering. Their massive gains from illicit transactions enable them to invest in finding new ways to game the system. Legacy AML software has not worked to stop them. However, if AML professionals get the right software to empower them, they can make financial crime harder and less profitable. As a result, the societal and environmental harm of financial crime would be significantly reduced. This is what the Lucinity AML software platform is designed to do.
The network effect is used to detect suspicious behavior
Lucinity’s AI enables AML professionals to learn from each other, even if they never meet in person or work for different financial organizations. Hundreds of banks and fintechs are on the Lucinity AML platform, and the algorithm constantly learns from compliance professionals when they process cases in the system. In other words, the more transaction processing takes place on the Lucinity AML platform, the smarter the AI becomes and more efficient in highlighting potentially illicit behaviors of actors to the AML officers that work on them. This happens even though all transactional and customer data is contained within each financial institution. Watch out, crooks!
Great user experience for financial crime fighters
The user experience (UX) of many legacy systems used by banks is not always conducive to enhanced employee job satisfaction or productivity. Legacy banking software is often hard to use, and the information presented to users is difficult to understand or use.
Legacy AML systems are no exception. Financial institutions neglect the UX of their enterprise software at a high cost. Companies lose around 15% to 40% of their productivity and profitability due to “complex and unusable enterprise software products.” Hard-to-use and clunky software are also bad for employee retention rates.
At Lucinity, we put the AML professional user first when we design our user interface. For example, when a user has clicked on a case, we tell a visual story about why the behavior is considered suspicious. Patterns and trends are clearly shown and easy to understand. Great UX is vital for busy AML compliance teams; it means more productivity and improved job satisfaction for the essential professionals that use it.
Spend less time SAR filing, have more time putting criminals out of business
Often it takes hours, even an entire workday, for AML professionals to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). With the Lucinity SAR manager, the process of organizing, reviewing, validating, and filing SARs is reduced to one hour. In addition, we facilitate straight-through regulatory filing to the available jurisdictions. Alternatively, the completed SAR can be downloaded for manual upload to the relevant regulatory portal. The time saved can be used to process more cases and make the Lucinity AI even more effective in making the lives of financial criminals a lot harder.
