ComplyAdvantage makes extensive use of artificial intelligence (AI). We recognize that legacy technologies are not solving the problem of combating financial crime risk in a dynamic financial services environment.
We view financial crime risk management as a lifecycle that begins with initial due diligence, continues to screen and monitor as part of ongoing due diligence, and ends with remediation and reporting.
Our use of AI spans all three stages of this lifecycle: initial due diligence, ongoing due diligence, and remediation and reporting.
Financial crime risk management lifecycle
Initial due diligence
For the initial due diligence stage, which focuses on understanding the risks associated with new business relationships, our AI capabilities include:
- agent AI We collect information from multiple data sources, including sanctions lists, known bad actor warning lists, politically exposed persons (PEP) lists, lists of top international organizations (HIOs) (required by Canadian law), and harmful media.
- Natural language processing (NLP) is employed to manage this data. This provides much more accurate data than that provided by traditional providers and forms the foundational layer of financial crime risk management.
- Entity resolution and Entity clustering is applied to selected data to optimize the accuracy of alerts generated when screening customers.
- Advanced search techniques using probabilistic scoring Our search engine goes beyond the simple text matching algorithms used to screen names in traditional solutions. Over 25 ComplyAdvantage models in global factor of production elements, including name commonality, gender matching, and transliteration to screening processes.
This multi-layered, AI-driven approach across data acquisition and curation, entity resolution, and advanced scoring models delivers the most accurate results in the industry. This accuracy is critical to reducing friction for customers (particularly important for digital financial services) by ensuring that analysts only see alerts that are truly worth investigating.
Our initial due diligence capabilities also include customer risk scoring. It combines static customer information, such as geo-demographic information, with screening results to provide an overall risk score that can be assessed against a financial institution's risk tolerance.
Customer information and risks are not static, so our focus shifts to the ongoing due diligence stage.
Business Overview: Agentic AI and AML Compliance
Learn how to test and implement agent AI across your organization to scale your business while streamlining compliance.
Download your copy
Ongoing due diligence
The ongoing due diligence phase, which focuses on understanding the risks associated with established relationships over time, uses the following AI capabilities:
- The same data collected and carefully selected by AI will be shown continuously to changes in either the underlying data sources or customer information to reflect evolving risk exposures over time.
- called AI model “Advanced Detector” Monitor customer activity that indicates financial crime. Our advanced detectors focus on money laundering and fraud detection, but can also detect money laundering-based crimes, in line with regulatory priorities from agencies such as FinCEN, EU (via 6AMLD), FATF, and FINTRAC. Our adverse media data is also mapped to many of these predicate crimes, enabling effective risk management across these aspects of risk.
- AI is also useful Prioritize alerts Generated from continuous monitoring, allowing analysts to focus on the highest-risk alerts first.
- AI is used to Scenario optimization. This means continually refining and improving detection scenarios over time to reflect the fact that financial crime techniques are not static.
Repair and reporting
The remediation and reporting phase, which focuses on managing investigations and notifying regulators and law enforcement of suspicious activity, uses the following AI capabilities:
- Agentic AI remediates specific low-risk alerts and casesfurther optimize the speed and accuracy of investigations and minimize customer friction.
- Agentic AI enriches your case Gather information from other systems and provide analysts with comprehensive details before starting an investigation.
- We are considering the use of Report creation with generative AIespecially regulatory reports that require explanatory text. We aim to develop a standard, consistent and descriptive response that will be welcomed by regulators. Using generative AI in STR narratives, you can also generate common tags from your investigations, which can be leveraged to provide more advanced analysis and improve alert prioritization in the future.
- our Scenario optimization AI Analyze the investigation results. This helps identify detection scenarios that may be generating unproductive alerts and cases. The goal is to optimize the process so that a high percentage of alerts result in incidents and a high percentage of cases result in suspicious transaction reports (STRs) or equivalent law enforcement reports.
Effectiveness of AI utilization
To build trust with our customers and ensure our solutions align with regulatory expectations, we focus on three key governance pillars: responsible AI, high-quality data, and a team of financial crime data experts.
Responsible AI
Our commitment to responsible AI is deeply embedded in our development process, ensuring that our AI technology adheres to strict ethical guidelines. This includes proactive risk management strategies and comprehensive independent validation to ensure fairness, transparency, and trust in AI-driven insights. By prioritizing ethical considerations, we build customer trust through the integrity and accountability of our solutions.
high quality data
The foundation of our AI models is our unwavering dedication to high-quality data. We implement rigorous data quality controls and foster strategic partnerships with our customers to ensure that the data powering our systems is accurate, consistent, and comprehensive. This meticulous approach to data management ensures that our AI algorithms are trained on trusted information, leading to more accurate risk assessments and fewer false positives. By emphasizing data excellence, we provide financial institutions with reliable and actionable intelligence.
Financial crime data experts
Our outstanding team of financial crime data experts complements our technical capabilities. These experts have extensive experience in dealing with the complexities of financial crime data, bringing deep expertise and practical insight to address complex challenges. This expertise ensures that our solutions are technically advanced and based on a thorough understanding of the evolving landscape of financial crime. By combining this human element with cutting-edge AI, we can offer our customers a holistic and robust approach to mitigating risk.
We recognize the model risks associated with AI deployments and proactively manage them using proactive strategies to identify, assess, and mitigate potential biases and inaccuracies that may arise. This approach to risk management ensures the continued effectiveness and reliability of our solutions.
We also emphasize data quality throughout our operations, recognizing that data integrity is paramount to providing accurate and reliable results for our customers. We demonstrate a comprehensive and responsible approach to leveraging AI to fight financial crime by prioritizing model risk management and continuous data quality improvement.
AI outcomes: speed and security
This holistic, AI-driven approach across the financial crime risk management lifecycle enables clients to meet compliance obligations, minimize reputational risk, and support moral obligations to fight financial crime. Importantly, in addition to effectively managing risk, our solutions also support the business imperative of reducing friction with customers, ensuring a positive customer experience even amidst stringent compliance requirements.
Transform AML compliance with AI-powered solutions
ComplyAdvantage Mesh, a cloud-based compliance platform, combines industry-leading AML risk intelligence with actionable risk signals to screen customers and monitor customer behavior in near real-time.
Get the demo
