SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 21, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Google Cloud today announced the launch of Anti Money Laundering AI (AML AI), an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered product designed to help global financial institutions more effectively and efficiently detect money laundering.
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.1 Money laundering proceeds are connected to illegal activities, ranging from drug and human trafficking to terrorist financing. 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 billion2 transactions or more a year for increasingly sophisticated illicit behavior.
Most legacy AML monitoring products 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).3 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.4
AML AI helps global financial institutions increase risk detection and lower operational cost
Google Cloud's AML AI provides a consolidated machine learning (ML)-generated customer risk score as an alternative to rules-based transaction alerting. The risk score is based on the bank's data including transactional patterns, network behavior, and Know Your Customer (KYC) data to identify instances and groups of high-risk retail and commercial customers. The product can adapt to changes in underlying data, delivering more accurate results, which increases overall program effectiveness and improves operational efficiency.
Google Cloud's AML AI is using proprietary ML technology as well as Google Cloud technologies, such as Vertex AI and BigQuery. The product handles the complexities of running ML at scale, while also providing enriched explanations of the outputs to enable financial institutions to expedite the investigation workflow and improve the customer experience. To date, the solution has been put in production across several geographical regulatory jurisdictions.
"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."