Fighting financial crime with AI

Itera and IBM gathered an expert panel from the financial industry to talk about anti-money laundering — one of the key challenges financial institutions will face in the future. This panel discussion highlights how banks are facing increased regulatory burdens, have manual processes and imprecise models for detecting financial crime.

Watch the full panel discussion here

Photo: Anita Arntzen

Better use of technology

Paul Clandillon is practice leader for fraud and Financial crime in IBM, and one of the leading subject matter experts on fraud and financial crime in Europe. He addressed the key challenges banks will face in the future.

“For many years, we have thrown people at AML. The truth is we are running out of people. And now is the time to se how we can apply technology.”

Paul Clandillon

Practice Leader, Fraud and Financial Crime / IBM

A necessary change

According to Clandillon, technology is the obvious answer on how to solve the problems connected with money laundering and terror financing in the future. He is pointing at a needed change in banks behaviour where they previously focused on individual transactions and tried to identify if the transaction was suspicious or potentially criminal.

“We need to start to look at behavior of people and entities to try and understand the context of their actions.”

Photo: Anita Arntzen

Collaboration is key

The rest of the expert panel consisted of Hege Hage, head of group AML in DNB, Julie Odden, CEO in Vega Integrity and Andreas Hobbelin, Head of AML & Financial Crime Prevention in ZTL Payment Solutions.

According to Hege Hagen, DNB now has over 500 dedicated employees working within the AML space. She agreed with Paul’s perspective on technology, and how we can utilize technology combined with other areas is the key to preventing financial crime.

Photo: Anita Arntzen

“We need to focus more on technology. We have been working to combine competence from different areas such as legal, operations and technology, and that is where the magic happens.”

Hege Hagen

Head of group AML / DNB

All the experts also agreed that more collaboration in the future will enable the banks to solve the problems connected to AML.

The collaboration between Bits and Finans Norge is mentioned as an example. But more information sharing between the banks and other financial institutions dealing with the issues of AML, is needed.

"We have seen a major improvement, going from zero collaboration to calling each other and sending e-mails."