ork.AI
We know banks and other financial institutions (FIs), and the FinCrime challenges that keep them up at night.
In fact, many of our own WorkFusion leaders know these challenges first-hand. They dealt with the same pain points as our customers in their former roles at banks and other FIs like Morgan Stanley, EY, UBS, consulting with a string of top banks, or even with the Department of Treasury. So when we partner up with FIs to help solve their toughest FinCrime problems, we’re not just throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks.
Rather, we purpose-built a digital workforce: AI FinCrime-fighters that work 24/7 on KYC, sanctions screening, transaction screening, and adverse media monitoring. Read on to learn how we equipped our AI Digital Workers with the specific and essential skills to fight FinCrime, and why crises like the Russia-Ukraine conflict and recent bank failures have only further underscored the need to handle FinCrime differently—with a digital workforce.
FinCrime Challenge #1: Slow, inefficient manual work leads to errors, burnout, quitting
Document-heavy manual work is fatigue-inducing and error-prone. And there’s no room for error in compliance ops with 9-figure fines and reputational damage at stake. That’s why our Digital Workers are trained in intelligent document processing (IDP). They thrive and continuously learn by performing work that requires manual document handling—to fetch, combine, synthesize, and evaluate data from several sources (with both unstructured and structured data)—automatically. Analysts agree we’re leaders of the IDP pack.
This makes rote yet complex AML and compliance work a perfect use case for Digital Workers. And we have Digital Workers to handle key roles: Darryl and Kendrick handle KYC, Tara handles transaction screening, and Evelyn handles sanctions and adverse media screening.
AI Digital Workers don’t eliminate, but rather augment analyst roles. What they do eliminate is the part of the role that leads to errors, burnout, and even quitting.
FinCrime Challenge #2: Increasing workload, decreasing workforce
Banks and FIs are being hammered from all sides when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent at their firms. Post-COVID, according to our survey of BFSI leaders conducted with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), “employees have set new expectations for their jobs…if they aren’t happy in their roles, they’re leaving…” Meanwhile, changing and increasing regulatory demands (due to changing and increasing FinCrime risks) not only drive compliance costs, but further stretch teams to the edge of their capacity. In this already unforgiving environment, the Russian-Ukraine war pummeled sanctions teams with an overnight spike in alert volumes.
Something’s got to give. Juggling all these conflicting demands, firms are looking for a sustainable solution so they can end this perpetual crisis mode, get some relief, and invest more of their time and creativity into satisfying customers and driving business—not just meeting compliance standards and defending from bad actors.
We’re not generalists. We have built our Digital Workers specifically for FinCrime processes. So we’re not showing up day one and saying ‘Hey, how are you doing this process?’ We’re showing up day one with an AI Digital Worker saying ‘We know how you do this. Here’s a Digital Worker custom fit for you.’
“The entire concept of our Digital Workforce is to start quickly with a pre-built solution,” says Paul Gozzo, WorkFusion’s Head of Automation Consulting. To this end, “the ability to be specific about the problems you solve is helpful.” While we partner with companies to build custom Digital Workers to perform a variety of job roles, our pre-built suite of Digital Workers is all about streamlining FinCrime ops, so you reap the benefits of this laser-focused deployment and lightning-fast time-to-value for your AML, KYC, and sanctions screening teams.
This is especially relevant for regional banks. Without a major in-house tech arm, they need an out-of-the-box solution that doesn’t break the bank, so to speak. Regulators themselves are not only open, but are now encouraging such tech partnerships.
FinCrime Challenge #3: Steady Growth amid Geopolitical Instability
We went over how increasing work volumes and geopolitical crises have made maintaining talent a major challenge for banks and their FinCrime teams. But let’s say you hire a Digital Worker, and ostensibly solve your talent problem. How exactly do the Digital Workers then solve the FinCrime problem in a way traditional employees can’t? Let’s look at the numbers.
Evelyn is a one-two-punch AI analyst who handles both sanctions screening and adverse media monitoring. Dealing with sanctions, Evelyn can adjudicate upwards of 1 million alerts annually, reducing 80%+ of alerts reviewed by an L1 analyst, so your team can focus on alerts that pose a true risk. Plus, “she” creates a full human-readable audit trail of her decision to satisfy regulators. She does all this automatically, in the background, around the clock.
As for adverse media monitoring, let’s look at a Florida-based community bank that recently hired Evelyn as its AI Digital Worker. After Evelyn got to work, the bank enjoyed an immediate $250k in savings just by replacing their existing news screening solution with WorkFusion’s proprietary Google API functionality that is optimized for adverse media. And by automating the work that would normally take 19 FTEs, their annualized savings were $1.4M+ in OpEx cost.
When a global event like the Russia-Ukraine war hits and causes an unprecedented sanctions alert volume spike, firms that already have Evelyn on their team performing all this work are that much more resilient to the shockwaves. With AI Digital Workers, it’s possible to move through crises, conduct business as usual, and thrive rather than just survive.
The Ultimate Use Case for Digital Workers: FinCrime and Compliance
Our Digital Workers combine the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), intelligent document processing (IDP), optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Our solutions are built to handle complex workflows, decision-making, and higher-value knowledge work like KYC and sanctions screening. These are document-heavy, error-prone, highly regulated FinCrime use cases that are far beyond point-and-click actions suited to RPA.
When your FinCrime and compliance teams face a superhuman volume of work, and that work requires very human “tribal knowledge” that analysts typically gain over time at their firm (and take with them when they quit), Digital Workers are the ideal solution to fill the gaps, consistently and reliably.
Want to see what our AI digital workforce can do for your FinCrime team? Schedule a demo.
