FARNBOROUGH, U.K.—Need for human investigators to manually sift through money laundering alerts is slowing the fight against fraud, a new report indicates.
While 74% of business customers think banks use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to spot money laundering, in reality most banks still rely almost solely on human investigators to manually sift through alerts, according to a new survey by BAE Systems.
As CUToday.info reported, more financial institutions are starting to turn to AI to assist with or take over monitoring of money laundering alerts.
The lack of automation is having a major impact on efficiency and expense when it comes to the fight against money laundering, BAE said.
“Compliance investigators at banks can spend up to three days of their working week dealing with alerts – which most of the time are false positives,” said Brian Ferro, global compliance solutions product manager at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, in a Computer Business Review report. “For banks to be on the front foot against money laundering, their investigators need to be supported by machine intelligence. Simplifying, optimizing and automating the sorting of these alerts to give human investigators more time is the single most valuable thing banks and the compliance industry can do in the fight against money launderers. Right now, small improvements in efficiency of the systems banks use to find laundering can yield huge results.”