Google Cloud is going to solve money laundering with artificial intelligence
Google Cloud has announced Anti Money Laundering AI. It is an AI tool that should make it easier for financial services to detect money laundering.
money laundering
Google Cloud calls the model that because it uses different data sources to create a risk score to see if there is a chance of money laundering. Money laundering is a major problem: 2 to 5 percent of global GDP is said to be laundered every year. That can amount to 2 trillion euros per year. Financial institutions are there to counter this, among other things. Google writes that, however, systems are used that are far from ideal.
“In fact, more than 95% of system-generated alerts in the first stage of the check turn out to be “false positives”, with about 98% never resulting in a suspicious activity report (SAR). High false positive rates require manual checks, costing the industry billions of dollars each year in wasted investigation time and distracting institutions from genuine suspicious activity.” Google Cloud’s AML AI leverages both proprietary ML technology and Google Cloud technologies, such as Vertex AI and BigQuery.
Transforming the financial sector
“Google’s models are already showing the tremendous potential of machine learning to transform financial crime efforts across the industry,” said Jennifer Calvery, Group Head of Financial Crime Risk and Compliance at HSBC. “By extending our customer monitoring framework with Google Cloud’s advanced AI-based product, we’ve been able to improve the accuracy of our financial crime detection and reduce the amount of alerts, reducing investigative time spent chasing false leads. We’ve also reduced the processing time required to analyze billions of transactions across millions of accounts from a few weeks to a few days.”
British bank HSBC is the first to use Google’s AI cloud technology. Here, the correct positive reports of money laundering would have become two to four times higher. Now the total number of reports has dropped by sixty percent and the false positives have therefore decreased significantly, says Google. What Anti Money Laundering AI costs for companies is still unknown.
