• AML experts’ new platform is now able to reduce false positives by more than 90% using Sanction Screening platform powered by machine learning

Leading Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Big Data firm Fortytwo Data has unveiled an upgraded version of its entity screening platform which can now reduce false positives by up to 93%.

The company, based in the City of London, has further developed its Sanction Screening Augmentation Platform, which bolts on to firms’ existing software.

Its innovative use of integrated ‘true’ AI has improved the rate of false positive detection by 31% over the last 12 months across a range of deployments, not just in financial services.

False positives – red flags produced by computing algorithms that, when inspected, are not suspicious at all – are the primary driver of swollen costs in the AML and Sanction Screening departments of financial institutions and major firms.

Most recently, the Fortytwo Data platform has been installed by a major global company, with immediate and substantial improvements in its screening processes leading to cost savings of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

When using its previous legacy system, the FTSE 100 giant was registering false positives for 5% of entities, all of which would then have to be manually checked.

Fortytwo Data’s augmentation platform has reduced this by over 90%, slashing the amount of time human AML supervisors have to spend vetting suspicious entities, which now represent less than 0.5% of the total number screened.

The sanction screening process was taking the legacy system three days to complete, resulting in more than 100,000 red flags. Fortytwo Data’s Augmentation Platform took just one hour to complete its run, slashing the numbers of false positives in the process.

This cut the amount of time needed to manually review the false positives, slashing the labour cost associated with this essential process.

Julian Dixon, CEO of Fortytwo Data, commented:

“We’re delighted the platform is having such an impact, not just inside financial firms, but cutting edge bluechips in a variety of sectors.

“It’s true that the regulatory bar is higher now than it has ever been for executives in charge of monitoring and due diligence.

“However, the technology has already caught up enough to make our platform, the only truly AI off-the-shelf solution in the world, the most cost-efficient solution.

“It’s a myth that large companies need to spend millions of pounds updating their systems and there are millions of pounds to be saved. Legacy systems don’t even need to be replaced – they just bolt together.”