AI to Keep Criminal Funds Out of the Financial System?
This week Rob Grupetta, Head of the Financial Crime Department at the UK’s FCA, spoke out on AI at an Anti Money Laundering (AML) event in London.
With UK banks spending a reported £5 billion each year — more than the the cost of the UK prison system — on financial crime prevention, there is every incentive for banks to start to invest in machine learning and other artificial intelligence technology to identify anomalies that might indicate money laundering.
If machines could learn to “sense” when something is not quite right while crawling through transactions in real time, they may be more capable of working effectively and autonomously in detecting suspicious activities. The thrust of the speech is that, as for many other kinds of AI innovation, this is likely to be a constant and complex effort, but one that shows extraordinary promise.
He concluded by saying “Artificial intelligence has the capability to greatly amplify the effectiveness of the machine’s human counterparts, but it will be a constant work in progress. Any bank hoping for a black box in the corner that will sniff out the launderers will be disappointed, but the technology has the capability to better achieve what we all want: keeping finance clean.”
Read the full speech here.
