ork.AI
You may have seen or heard the term ‘agentic AI’ recently. What is it? The term, also known as autonomous AI, refers to artificial intelligence systems designed to operate independently with minimal human intervention. These AI agents can make decisions, plan, and adapt to achieve predefined goals.
WorkFusion was an early innovator of AI agents. In 2022, the company released its first six AI Agents (aka Digital Workers), highly skilled and experienced AI anti-money laundering (AML) analysts designed to quickly and easily scale financial crime compliance operations teams to mitigate risk and improve program efficiency, freeing up analysts to focus on higher-value investigations and improving customer satisfaction.
WorkFusion’s AI Agents for FinCrime compliance are pre-built, proven technology controls that AML compliance organizations use to mitigate risk and enable operational growth. By automating many of the manual and repetitive tasks compliance analysts have suffered through for decades, AI Agents free up millions of hours a year for investigators to focus on actual risky activity and enable financial crime compliance executives to better allocate people and budgets.
For AML teams, risk comes in many forms, particularly in the area of compliance operations. But now, teams can leverage AI Agents to minimize operational risk introduced by multiple conditions:
- Alert surges
- Inadequate staffing
- Slow staff onboarding
- Poor staff retention
- Missed alert escalations and true positives
- Missing sanctions nexus
- Bad rationale/incorrect alert adjudication types
- Delays picking up alerts from L1
- Backlogs in alert adjudication
- Indefensible/inconsistent explanations
- Alerts not cleared within 24 hours from L2
- Poor customer satisfaction resulting from slow onboarding
Easier, faster and cheaper than hiring employees or outsourcing, AI Agents quickly scale team capacity by fulfilling complete level 1 AML analyst job roles in functions like sanctions screening alert review, adverse media monitoring, transaction monitoring investigations, KYC and pKYC.
Each AI Agent is ‘smart’ right out of the box — like hiring an employee with up to five years of experience. By automating the tedious work, the AI Agents give L1 analysts the time and clarity to focus on the areas that bring the most risk to the business.
AI Agents are NOT screening tools
The WorkFusion AI Agents work alongside and integrate with a financial institution’s screening tools, residing between the screening tools and the operations staff. This allows the AI Agents to collaborate with both sides to perform specific, end-to-end compliance processes.
As an example of a FinCrime compliance AI Agent at work, let’s look at how a process works when using our AI Agent for adverse media alert adjudication:
Taking information or alerts from a standard adverse media screening tool like Thomson Reuters® Clear, the AI Agent reviews adverse media information and alerts about a bank’s customers and potential customers. Using AI in its review, the AI Agent prioritizes and adjudicates articles (and other information) based on demographic data, materiality, focality, and other attributes.
Because the AI Agent is prebuilt with deep industry and alert review knowledge, it can fully investigate an entity with as little information as just a name. The AI Agent highlights articles and other information that indicate high risk, passing those cases to a human analyst to review.
The technologies inside an AI Agent for FinCrime compliance
AI Agents are purpose-built for financial crime compliance because they have been designed on the WorkFusion platform that combines AI, machine learning (ML), intelligent document processing (IDP), automation, and orchestration to create a complete worker that performs specific end-to-end processes.
Here are the other important technologies built into and around the WorkFusion AI Agents:
- Pre-built model building
- Rules engine
- Integrations to screening and enterprise systems
- Enrichment sources
- Human-in-the-loop UIs
- High volume infrastructure
- ML Ops
- QA/QC controls
- Security, governance and audit trails
As you can see, the WorkFusion AI Agents are not the result of “AI washing” a limited technology. Their designs have been based on 10+ years of applying all of these technologies – including multiple subsets of AI – to specific compliance operations use cases. In fact, the ML aspect of WorkFusion’s technology platform has been in use at some of the largest global banks since the early 2010’s. This is why four of the top five US banks and leading financial institutions around the world use WorkFusion AI Agents and/or the WorkFusion technology platform – some for over a decade. You can read about our customers’ use of AI Agent technology here.
The business case to “hire” an AI Agent is clear
AI Agents for FinCrime compliance make an easy business case for AML compliance leaders seeking to mitigate risk, improve operations, and minimize costs. They apply proven technology to future-proof their financial crime compliance operations instead of building their own, and they do so for three main reasons:
#1: Time-to-Value. It would take years for a business to custom-build their own AI Agent(s). Even if they did, by the time the project is completed, they would need to update and re-integrate too many of the underlying capabilities. And even then, the final in-house product would not enjoy the same regulatory acceptance as WorkFusion AI Agents. Our AI Agents have been evaluated by regulators at banks large and small, and always in the context of a financial institution’s model risk management (MRM) strategy.
#2: Scope of Value. Just a single AI Agent is, essentially, a solution that generates significant value – most often in the millions of dollars – by driving efficiency, speed, and higher quality into AML compliance operations. Moreover, our AI Agent portfolio offers multiple starting points, use cases, and areas of impact.
#3: Minimal Maintenance. In traditional software deployments (particularly in-house solutions integrating to multiple systems), the cost to maintain the software and associated integrations represents the majority of the costs. In many cases, that is still not enough, because the technologists who built the solution may leave the organization, making the solution even more difficult to update, expand, and maintain. WorkFusion delivers and updates the AI Agents and their underlying technologies regularly, using traditional minor and major version releases.
Specific to the maintenance of the AI models underpinning the AI Agents, QA/QC controls perform ongoing monitoring via human-in-the-loop to check model performance and detect model drift from the original intent. Continuous learning automatically employed by the AI Agents makes them smarter every day, as they continuously use, collect, and re-train on the latest data. Finally, no-code UIs simplify configurations and give compliance teams the option to make their own AI Agent modifications with ease.
In summary, AI Agents are helping many financial crime compliance teams to modernize and gain efficiency in their AML compliance operations – and for great reasons. Those organizations that hire proven AI are enjoying the benefits and promise of AI without adding risk. In fact, they are reducing risk in their AML compliance operations by performing more work faster and at higher rates of quality and consistency.
To learn more about our AI Agents for FinCrime compliance, sign up for a quick demo.