Google Cloud has launched an artificial intelligence-powered Anti Money Laundering AI (AML AI) product designed to help global financial institutions more effectively and
efficiently detect money laundering.
In a statement
announcing the new product, it acknowledged that money laundering is a complex
problem with a growing global impact.
“The amount of money
laundered each year is estimated to be 2-5% of global GDP, or up to $2
trillion annually. Money laundering proceeds are connected to illegal
activities, ranging from drug and human trafficking to terrorist financing,” the
statement said.
“Today, anti-money
laundering programs consume significant resources for financial institutions,
many of which operate across a variety of global and regional regulatory
bodies. In fact, large financial institutions report monitoring four billion transactions
or more a year for increasingly sophisticated illicit behavior,” it added.
Most legacy AML
monitoring products as indicated by Google Cloud are reliant on manually
defined rules, which yield low rates of identifying suspicious activities. Even
in the most advanced implementations of rules-based systems, money launderers
can learn and work around these rules to avoid detection.
In fact, more than 95%
of system-generated alerts turn out to be "false positives" in the
first phase of review, with approximately 98% never culminating in a suspicious
activity report (SAR). High rates of false positives require manual
reviews, which costs the industry billions of dollars in wasted investigation
time each year and distract institutions from true suspicious activity.
"Google is a pioneer in AI, and now we're making our tools,
technologies, and expertise available to solve one of the biggest and most
costly challenges in the financial services industry," said Thomas
Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "Building
on our commitment to bring AI-powered innovation to the financial services
industry, we are launching Google Cloud's AML AI to help financial institutions
more accurately and efficiently identify AML risk while enhancing business
operations and governance."
AML AI can help
customers reduce their operational costs while simultaneously improving the
strength of their AML program. In the future, Google Cloud plans to provide
Generative AI foundations for the financial services industry with the goal of
boosting employee productivity, for example, to reduce the time needed for an
analyst to investigate potential suspicious activity.
By:
Nana Appiah Acquaye
