Regtech Napier AI unveiled Insights AI, its new solution to help companies enhance their anti-money laundering (AML) screening processes.
The new offering will help financial crime compliance teams close key gaps in AML investigations by providing behavioral analytics and AI-enabled explanations of contributing activity.
Headquartered in London, Napier AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018.
AI-powered financial crime compliance solutions provider Napier AI announced new functionality in its Transaction Monitoring solution that will help firms with their anti-money laundering (AML) screening. The new offering, Insights AI, provides behavioral analytics and natural language explanations for use in financial crime compliance, closing what Napier called “critical gaps” in anti-money laundering investigations.
The new functionality comes courtesy of an innovation partnership between Napier AI and the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), with the company leveraging the FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox to test new models and strategies. The goal was to provide financial crime compliance teams with a tool that would surface clear, AI-enabled explanations of customer behavior beyond the initial alert. These insights would be available directly within transaction monitoring tasks, highlighting behavioral patterns and illuminating potential new or emerging risks during the investigation. This is because, for most compliance teams, the challenge is less total alert volume and more about investigation inefficiency. To this end, Insights AI identifies relevant behavioral patterns, explains contributing activity in context, reduces the amount of time spent on manual data analysis, and enables compliance teams to focus on more complex issues during the investigation process.
Napier Chief Data Scientist Janet Bastiman underscored the value of the relationship between the company and the FCA. “Participating in the FCA Supercharged Sandbox allowed us to design and run new approaches to testing AI models for anti-money laundering,” Bastiman said. “One of the biggest historical challenges in tackling complex money laundering typologies is the disconnected nature of the data required for pattern analysis along the complete lifecycle of customer behavior or transaction flows.”
Under the name “Project Theseus,” the technology was tested for pattern mining and fluid dynamics as part of the FCA Supercharged Sandbox Showcase. This involved the deployment of frequency-based AI algorithms on large-scale synthetic financial data sets to identify money laundering typologies more effectively than traditional rules-based systems—while using significantly less computing power. The tested AML transaction monitoring models now form part of the Napier AI Continuum platform and support the company’s newly announced Insights AI feature.
“The embedding of Insights AI into our Transaction Monitoring solution is all about ensuring the incredible data science behind the scenes is surfaced in a way that puts power into the hands of AML analysts, to make the best possible human-in-the-loop decisions for the alerts,” Napier AI Chief Product Officer Will Monk said. “We lead with a compliance-first approach to AI in AML by partnering closely with the FCA so we can ensure our product aligns with regulatory guidance and meets policy goals around reducing the impact of economic crime on the UK.”
Founded in 2015, Napier AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018 in London. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its customer screening and transaction monitoring enhancement software enables firms to enhance their AML and client screening processes. The company’s technology helps reduce false positives by up to 80% while significantly lowering operational risk and cost.
Napier AI began the year with the launch of MV Shield—Powered by Napier AI. The fruit of a partnership between Napier AI and banking technology provider Mutual Vision, MV Shield is a compliance-as-a-service (CaaS) solution built specifically for building societies and credit unions in the UK and Canada. MV Shield provides an alternative to standard AML systems, aligning its controls, reporting, and risk models to the specific needs of membership-based financial institutions.
Photo by Thomas Windisch
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