Firms in the financial sector must comply with a series of regulations for the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing (AML/FT). To do this, they have had to design and implement complex processes to comply with the specific regulations of each jurisdiction in which they operate. Today, the popularity of new financial technologies, such as remote banking, the use of cryptocurrencies, e-commerce platforms, etc., make regulatory compliance even more complex. Although there are software tools to detect suspicious transactions, these are usually based on the knowledge of subject matter experts, but as new criminal tactics emerge, software detection mechanisms become outdated and need to be updated. The use of new technologies based on Machine Learning come to alleviate this problem, since this type of algorithms are capable of learning from the data, without the need for the programmer to re-code expert knowledge. They also provide anomaly detection capabilities that vastly exceed those of humans.
Grupo AIA is the creator of the AML SIOPEIA GEB platform, which uses Artificial Intelligence techniques to analyze a large volume of data and offers a solution to the AML/FT problem to important financial entities in Spain and Portugal. This proposal to RED.ES is aimed at applying state-of-the-art Machine Learning techniques to improve the quality of the suspicions generated by the analysis processes, both to reduce false positives and to increase the types of risk cases detected (that is, reduce also false negatives). Along the same lines, it proposes applying network/graph analysis to establish new detection criteria based on characteristics of the customer relationship graph and their operations. In addition, in the field of robotics, it is proposed to automate the manual processes of the supervision team, by applying face recognition. And finally, to also reduce the workload of analysts, it proposes applying machine learning to triage suspicions, so that their review reduces the risks of the entity.
The public entity RED.ES, attached to Spain’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, through the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, through the 2021 Call for aid for R&D projects in artificial intelligence and other digital technologies and their integration into value chains, has granted financial support to the company APLICACIONES EN INFORMÁTICA AVANZADA, S.L. as a beneficiary of the grant for the development of the project “ADVANCED DETECTION OF MONEY LAUNDERING WITH MACHINE LEARNING”.
