When it comes to online financial crimes, imagining a masked man sprinting away with someone else’s valuables does not paint the right picture!
The modern-day reality is that the type, variety and extent of financial crimes are on the rise today and it is that much crucial for tech innovators, as well as banking and financial institutions to find innovative ways to protect their own information and that of their customer’s too.
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Pratik Adani, CTO at Samco Securities Limited
When it comes to banks, the defenses that they build to ensure user safety and protection has to be more tech centric today and consist of an end-to-end process that allows better protection of their whole financial system, in order to help prevent misuse or circulation of profits made from illegal sources.
How Can New Technology Help: A Few Things to Keep in Mind when it Comes to Financial Crimes
- Understanding the Changing Nature of Online Financial Criminals: As technologies get more sophisticated and as algorithms become more refined, on the one hand it is easier to spot fraudulent activities faster among volumes of transactions. But with the innovations in modern fintech, the minds of online fraudsters have evolved as well. Today, most online criminals end up disguising their transactions to look like “normal” transactions to cheat the technology. It is therefore crucial for teams to understand the evolving behaviors of financial criminals before the invest in developing new capabilities to fight online financial crimes.
- AI and ML backed capabilities: Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities can help develop a more sophisticated view of what looks out of the ordinary, out of the volumes of data within the system, in a more timely manner, thereby helping financial institutions and banks provider better turnaround times to put correctional measures in place in case of an incident.
HSBC’s Global Social Networks Analytics (GSNA) system that was built with support from Quantexa, uses more than 40 billion data points and references over 30 billion transactions to identify the links to tackle financial crimes between different transactions and customers.
- Instant Identification of Potential Threats: To stay ahead of the evolving threats in the financial marketplace, technology has to help teams incorporate new capabilities into their platforms, apps or digital systems to help allow them to carry out the right kind of investigations by identifying the most critical activities among millions of instant transactions being conducted daily
Read More: Three Ways Buy Now Pay Later Reduces Cart Abandonment
The Future
Emerging threats and risks for banks and financial institutions can arise due to multiple factors. Seeing how cybercrime instances and malicious hacking have also intensified, not only do technologists need to define new capabilities, regulators need to continually revise rules to suit changing business environments. In the recent past, financial institutions have been seeing that their existing approaches to fighting online financial crimes may not be enough to handle the many kinds of threats and risks today. This is how business leaders in finance are now transforming their operating models and processes to obtain a better view of the evolving landscape of financial crime to ensure a more efficient and effective management of financial fraud and risk.
