Financial Crime World

Here is the rewritten article in markdown format:

Artificial Intelligence Takes Center Stage in Fighting Financial Crime in Syria

Overview

In a bid to combat the growing menace of financial crime in the Syrian Arab Republic, financial institutions and RegTech firms are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and prevent illicit activities.

The Problem: Financial Crime on the Rise

According to estimates, $3.1 trillion in illicit funds flowed through the global financial system last year alone, with money laundering accounting for trillions of dollars that helped fund international criminal activities, including human trafficking, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing.

Financial criminals are getting smarter and more dangerous with the help of advanced technologies that have become cheaper and easier to access than ever before. However, financial institutions and RegTech companies are deploying many of the same technologies, including AI and generative AI, to combat the growing criminal enterprise.

The Solution: Leveraging AI to Combat Financial Crime

“What AI is allowing us to do is to really start seeing how bad actors are interacting with others,” said Nikhil Aggarwal, managing director in the Anti-Money Laundering Consulting practice at Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics. “When you’re able to visualize a broader network, you’re able to do a deeper investigation into rings, and this really allows you to see some of those interconnected patterns in terms of how these threat actors are oftentimes working together.”

RegTech Firms on the Front Lines

RegTech firms like ThetaRay, which employs its own proprietary machine learning algorithms, are using AI to leverage massive stores of data collected by banks to fight financial crime more efficiently and precisely. “AI is good at analyzing larger scale of data and spotting patterns in a very large scale of data,” said Dagan Osovlansky, chief product officer at ThetaRay.

The firm’s financial crime detection platform monitors over $15 trillion worth of transactions using AI, and its technology has already resulted in a significant decline in false positives - the flagging of normal banking activity as suspicious - at several partner banks, including Santander.

Other Players in the RegTech Space

  • Lucinity: An AI software startup based in Iceland that uses AI to provide firms with insight to improve their financial crime compliance.
  • HSBC: Co-developed its AI system with Google to check for financial crime.
  • JPMorgan Chase: Chief operating officer Daniel Pinto said at the bank’s investor day that AI will make its KYC process up to 90% faster by the end of next year.

Challenges Ahead

However, data availability remains a significant challenge for financial institutions and their partners. “Underlying data blocks, data quality, and data hygiene are a perennial challenge when it comes to stringing data together to deploy AI effectively,” said Deloitte’s Aggarwal.

As the use of AI in fighting financial crime continues to grow, it is clear that this technology holds great promise for detecting and preventing illicit activities.