Banking Tech Awards USA 2022 Winner: Symphony AyasdiAI

Symphony AyasdiAI won the Tech of the Future – Data, AI, ML & RPA category for its SensaAML solution at the Banking Tech Awards USA 2022.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come to the fore of financial services in the past few years with a myriad of case uses. One of the big success stories of AI has been in the risk and fraud arena, because AI can plough through huge volumes of data to identify patterns, things that don’t quite fit and find the needle in the haystack that gives cause for alarm.

Simon Moss, Symphony AyasdiAI: AI does not look for a needle in a haystack, but rather for a needle in a stack of needles

Or, as our CEO, Simon Moss, likes to say, AI does not look for a needle in a haystack, but rather for a needle in a stack of needles.

Symphony AyasdiAI’s product, SensaAML, has maximised the power of AI to just that. It empowers banks and financial institutions with a complete picture of customer, third-party and user behaviour to discover crime, risk and competitive opportunity through unparalleled, predictive insights.

The overall result of our interface is a reduction in false positives and the detection of risks unidentified by the incumbent TMS without overwhelming investigators with an excessive number of net new alerts.

The product works simultaneously to provide automation and intelligence in the areas that need it the most. It was designed to work in parallel with existing processes and can augment current rules and thresholds, plus provide additional insights from better data mapping and discovery using AI and graph machine learning (ML).

SensaAML is completely transparent, auditable, and explainable for regulatory compliance. The solution was created to deliver maximum impact on return on investment (ROI) and effectiveness while keeping the smallest footprint on management and implementation changes.

This next-generation platform of ground-breaking AI and ML technology allows Ayasdi to lead the way in helping financial institutions successfully mitigate against the occurrence of criminal activity within their organisations.

The timing could not be better. Financial crime is at all time high – the COVID pandemic provided the perfect opportunity for criminal actors to abuse both the economic climate and the growing number of individuals negatively impacted by the loss of employment. The net result has been a disproportionate increase in fraudulent banking activity and heightened sophistication of money laundering tactics.

There was a clear need for a robust solution!

In addition, the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Act of 2020 introduced supplementary regulatory and compliance initiatives for FIs, and thus provided Ayasdi with the ideal scenario to showcase the SensaAML solution and the vast benefits it brings to satisfying these obligations.

This solution combines graph machine learning, behaviour maps, inference relationships, longitudinal behaviour and risk in a single orchestration to discover the DNA of complex financial crime.

SensaAML is a cloud-native, microservices and application programming interface (API) oriented design, a holistic solution with built-in integrations for case management systems and other tools.

With the wealth of investments financial institutions have made in existing AML and fraud technologies, we fully understand that “rip and replace” is not a viable option for most of them. This philosophy lies at the heart of the development of SensaAML to create a platform to work alongside legacy transaction monitoring systems.

In addition, the lightweight and agile nature of our system means implementation times are significantly reduced (typically three months) to ensure a quick and seamless ROI is delivered.

During our initial implementations, we have generated impressive statistics that prove the efficacy of our solution.

We’ve achieved a 20% increase in L3 detection, up to 90% accuracy in new risk detection, risks can be identified up to a year earlier, and there’s been a 60% reduction in false positives.

SensaAML has received numerous industry recognitions, resulting in a flurry of unsolicited requests for proposal (RFPs) inviting us to bid for AML solution programmes. To date, we have progressed to the proof-of-concept stage with 50% of these invitations.

Our goal over the coming year is to combine them into a FRAML solution providing comprehensive risk coverage and operational effectiveness. By leveraging third-party and first-party data of banks, we can provide real-time decisioning for a frictionless customer experience and bring a key competitive advantage for our customers.