As the world sees the perpetuation of money laundering schemes, Google Cloud is helping banks in the fight against it as it rolls out an artificial intelligence-powered tool aimed directly at spotting them, with effectiveness and efficiency.
Banks the world over employ measures that actively fights cases of money laundering, often underpinned by programming based on established guidelines. But Google Cloud is setting its newly-launched product apart from the pack by doing away with this old design.
Money laundering is a serious business that sees a small percentage—or 2 to 5 percent—of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) slipping through the cracks, estimated to be at $2 trillion annually, per United Nations. This comes amid active efforts to prevent its occurrence based on systems that were put into place in the span of a few decades worth billions of dollars. But according to an initial review, 95 percent of detections are “false positives.”
Google Cloud, meanwhile, offers an alternative, which adheres to a completely diverse formula, based on a combined machine learning-generated risk score. Through the combination of network behavior, transactional patterns, and data derived from Know-Your-Customer (KYC) information, the tool generates a score that distinguishes a client as high-risk.
Via the newly designed approach, Google Cloud promises a cut down on alert notifications by over 60 percent, as seen with HSBC. Consequently, it caused HSBC’s “true positives” to double or quadruple, strongly suggesting a higher accuracy with the measure.
Apart from HSBC, other banks that currently employ Google Cloud’s anti-money laundering tool include Denmark’s Lunar and Brazil’s Banco Bradesco.