Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the 2020 outlook was an encouraging one as the year was shaping up to be positive for many industries. At the mid-year point of 2020, the world has changed, and we continue to observe the pandemic’s impact on our communities, economy, and businesses.
It is no surprise that AI and automation have played key roles during the COVID-19 pandemic in several industries including pharma, healthcare, grocery, and financial services, accelerating efforts in digital transformation and workplace automation.
Financial Crime Investigator Scarcity
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult for financial institutions to keep pace with their regulatory requirements. Global financial centers critical to supporting financial crime prevention efforts are incapacitated by the pandemic, reducing the availability, productivity, and efficiency of financial crime teams now working remotely. Additionally, stay-at-home and business shutdown orders across the globe, especially in areas where AML is commonly managed and work-from-home infrastructure is underdeveloped, has further stressed investigative capacity.
Attempts to bolster these labor-intensive functions are met with the challenge of remotely training temporary workers. Consultants who normally provide skilled human capital are equally overwhelmed. Anticipating these issues, FinCEN publicly requested that FIs affected by the COVID-19 pandemic contact their functional regulator as soon as practicable with concerns about any potential delays in its ability to file required BSA reports.
Creating further complication, it has been discovered that more alerts than usual are coming from transaction monitoring systems (TMS) which misinterpret the new patterns of the COVID-related economy as suspicious and in need of investigation.
According to a compliance officer at a New York-based bank, there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of alerts it has had to investigate since entering the crisis. “Most of them are false positives, but we aren’t prepared to handle the volume of investigations. The backlog is starting to become significant,” the compliance officer said.
Automating AML Investigations
To ensure financial institutions can keep pace with regulated requirements and to keep the world’s financial transactions and trades flowing, adaptations of QuantaVerse’s Alert Investigator solution have been devised that can immediately augment investigation efforts or can be added to disaster preparedness strategies and activated as an investigator contingency effort if a critical shortage develops.
QuantaVerse offers two ways in which its Alert Investigator solution can aid banks’ staff-constrained compliance divisions:
With the QuantaVerse Alert Investigator, automated investigations of alerts lessen the impact of investigator shortages thereby eliminating the potential for serious backlogs. The QuantaVerse Alert Investigator solution is fully capable of replicating and automating industry best practices when conducting an investigation. And unlike tools that focus on individual steps within an AML/BSA investigative process, the QuantaVerse end-to-end financial crime platform has been proven to automate more than 80 percent of the investigative effort.
For more information on the QuantaVerse Alert Investigator, please visit: https://quantaverse.net/our-solutions/anti-money-laundering-aml-solutions.