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Within a rapidly evolving sanctions landscape, banking and financial services (BFS) organizations must adapt to remain compliant. Even before COVID-19, the “Great Resignation,” and the recent conflict in Eastern Europe, operations teams were challenged by new regulations, more sanctions programs and constant streams of alerts.
How can banks and other financial organizations ensure compliance yet create bandwidth that allows workers to adapt to change without burning out? As part of the WorkFusion Buzz webinar series, we introduced a solution in Evelyn, a digital sanctions and adverse media screening analyst. This AI-led Digital Worker can resolve a significant amount of the burden, freeing real-world teams to focus on understanding requirements and achieving best outcomes.
Automating sanctions alert reviews
Evelyn focuses on sanctions and adverse media screening alerts. She is an expert in global regulatory requirements (including BSA/OFAC, the EU and the UK, among others), with a passion for adverse media monitoring, name screening and sanction screening.
As explained in Evelyn’s job description, she analyzes, investigates, and (most importantly) actions sanctions alerts for entities, individuals and securities. She also searches and reviews media sources to determine relevance and whether mentions are potentially adverse. She consults third-party sources such as internal systems, the internet, commercial databases and research organizations to support her decisions. Accumulating facts from investigations for compliance and internal audit ensures adherence to regulatory policies for customers and transactions.
Why automated sanctions compliance is so important to BFS
Evelyn has two key skills: Name Sanction Screening Alert Review and Adverse Media Monitoring.
For Name Sanctions Screening, Evelyn reduces over 80% of false-positive sanctions alerts. She automates alert reviews for individuals, entities and securities, dispositioning sanctions alerts against Watch List Entities through name matching, date of birth, location, stop words, and historical hits. This includes researching for Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and sourcing data from internal and external data sources.
For Adverse Media Monitoring, Evelyn removes over 80% of the manual handling. She automatically reviews potentially adverse mentions of an individual or entity, determining the relevancy and sentiment of the news article and ranks the results based on a risk-based analysis. After prioritizing the results, Evelyn escalates her findings to real-world colleagues for quick assessment, then generates a narrative report.
By leveraging Evelyn for these skills, AML teams can exert less effort on manual reviews of alerts and news, so they can focus on other areas of sanctions compliance.
Automation in action for sanctions compliance
Evelyn is already at work, generating value for banks and other financial institutions (FIs). One top North American bank has added 50% more new content while reducing 95% of false positives. In doing so, they have created capacity of over 100 FTEs through automation, saving over $15 million annually. Another major European bank has reduced 25–50% of handling time, achieving their goals of accelerating case management. In automating 25,000 cases per quarter, they have returned tens of thousands of hours back to the business. And that’s just a start of the impact Evelyn has across BFS!
More efficient sanctions compliance
In a tough environment for sanctions teams, Evelyn simplifies the life of analysts currently tasked with manual sanctions and adverse media screens. FIs putting her to work take advantage of the value she creates, making it that much easier to remain compliant.
Learn more:
- Watch WorkFusion Buzz S1:E1
- Read our “Digital Times Call for a Digital Workforce” white paper
- Additional resources about Evelyn: Sanctions and Adverse Media Screening Analyst
