What should banks look for in an anti-financial crime solution?

As the world becomes increasingly digital, addressing regulatory compliance and securing data and systems is at the top of business agendas across industries. It’s one of the dominant trends and priorities identified through the 1,400 in-person interviews we held with business and IT executives around the world as part of this year’s CGI Client Global Insights, and it’s an area where CGI is innovating to help clients better protect their systems, processes and data.

This focus on protection is even stronger in banking, where customer trust is critical. Financial crime, in particular, is a key concern for banks, as threats continue to increase and evolve. Billions of financial transactions take place each day and ensuring each is legitimate is a major challenge.

Demand for a single, end-to-end solution

Until recently, banks that manage transactions have relied on multiple solutions to cover different aspects of protection, including fraud detection, customer due diligence and anti-money laundering. However, as digitalization increases the volume and speed of transactions, along with the risk of financial crime, banks are looking for a single, end-to-end solution that handles these three key functions holistically.

In addition, with the rise in instant payments, banks now need to monitor financial transactions in real time. Batch processing of payments gave them more time—days in fact—to analyze transactions for fraud, but real-time processing demands instantaneous review, that is, within milliseconds. Banks as a result, are looking for real-time anti-financial crime capabilities.

In addition, in the digital age, fraud is becoming increasingly sophisticated and easily replicated across the globe 24/7, putting additional pressure on financial institutions.

Driving effective risk mitigation and operational excellence

Overall, through an end-to-end, real-time anti-financial crime solution, banks want to achieve two key benefits: effective risk mitigation and operational excellence. They need a platform that offers a wide range of advanced features that help them reduce risks, drive efficiencies and save costs. Ideal features include real-time monitoring, big data analysis, machine learning, cloud hosting and regulatory compliance—all supported by the latest technologies.  

Combined, these features enable banks to quickly, accurately and cost-effectively review each transaction, identify the customer and detect suspicious behavior, while, at the same time, comply with regulatory requirements. The system’s algorithms also should enable banks to proactively identify and combat new financial crime tactics as they emerge.

In our 2018 CGI Client Global Insights, banks across the retail banking, corporate and transaction banking, and capital market sectors resoundingly cited protecting the bank as a top trend, business priority and IT priority. It’s also a top area of IT investment this year and over the next three years. Finding the right solution to stay ahead of financial crime has never been more important.

As a leader in anti-financial crime solutions, CGI anticipated these demands by modernizing our HotScan and Centaur solutions, merging both onto a new architecture that combines the best of their capabilities and delivers end-to-end anti-financial crime functionality. In addition, the new platform integrates real-time capabilities that enable clients to scale to and instantly analyze increasing volumes through emerging technologies such as behavioral, predictive and data analytics, along with machine learning. 

If you’d like to learn more about our work in this area and CGI HotScan360, or discuss your own organization’s financial crime challenges, feel free to contact me.