Taking on Financial Crime: NICE Actimize Drives AI, Cloud, and Data Intelligence to Address FI’s Challenges

Responding to growing challenges within financial crime, NICE Actimize and its CEO Craig Costigan launched multiple product innovations this past quarter – ranging from anti-money laundering and enterprise fraud to case management. With these and other advancements, as a leader in financial crime, risk and compliance solutions, NICE Actimize demonstrated its commitment to the industry’s massive digital transformation, advancing further developments in the Cloud and the critical role of artificial intelligence.

Global Banking & Finance Review caught up with Costigan on the eve of its customer event, ENGAGE, where the financial services industry’s top experts in financial crime, risk, and compliance meet to talk about essential breakthroughs impacting their businesses’ bottom lines and customer interactions. ENGAGE New York is the final lap of this year’s ENGAGE program, which featured targeted events in London, England, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

NICE Actimize sits squarely at the intersection of all financial crime disciplines. What have you seen as the top three business priorities taking center stage at financial institutions as they meet at your industry gatherings this year?

No matter where customers are in their adoption of new advanced technologies, our focus always has been solving industry-wide challenges. Artificial intelligence has proven to be an integral part of the answer to driving speed and agility. As the hottest topic in the industry, it is a game changer. NICE Actimize has focused on AI-based solutions to address an environment moving at light speed.

Financial institutions require a powerful combination of intelligence, visualization, and automation to reduce investigation time, manage workflows, and enable more intelligent decisions. Our market-leading alert and case management solution meets today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, providing the heart and intelligence for financial crime-fighting units.

Following AI, the other big focus area is the Cloud which provides the speed of innovation, economics, agility, and elasticity. All sizes of financial institutions are investing in cloud initiatives. While we have innovative offerings explicitly designed for tier-one financial institutions, our breakthrough technologies also target and support the mid-market which has own unique needs and required capabilities. Our cloud business has grown in the double digits and continues to accelerate across all of our markets.

Last but certainly not least is the focus on data and its value in the entire customer life cycle. Managing data effectively is paramount and critical to providing collective intelligence, industry insights, pattern analysis, predictive analytics, benchmarking, and more. Many jurisdictions consider data collection, analysis, and reporting critical to combat market misconduct and evidence compliance. Indeed, our expertise in both the Cloud and AI align well with successfully managing data. In the end, using AI effectively leads us to understand that it contributes to operational efficiency (doing more with less), improved accuracy, and preventing illicit activity before it happens.

Our advanced analytics technologies allow us to analyze vast amounts of data in real time, identifying potential compliance risks and enabling organizations to address issues before they become serious problems proactively.

So summing up the importance of these three innovations, AI generates the CEO trifecta: it contributes to increasing revenue, reducing risk, and lowering costs.

As you mentioned, data management is a crucial focus in today’s financial crime programs. Whether completing due diligence processes, conducting periodic reviews, or assessing a monetary transaction, all require up-to-date, reliable data. What is NICE Actimize advancing concerning its data intelligence strategies?

NICE Actimize has invested heavily in its data intelligence solutions through its robust research & development process. In today’s fast-paced digital world, financial services organizations need a single view of customers and counterparties to honestly assess threats and opportunities at every point within the customer life cycle, and data management is key to achieving that goal.

Organizations need high-quality data, accurate risk scoring, proven intelligence, and ongoing monitoring for true customer life cycle risk management to achieve this. Our X-Sight DataIQ solution provides financial institutions with a comprehensive and enriched view of customer and counterparty risk. X-Sight DataIQ aggregates content from various global data sources – continuously monitoring for changes, such as updates in global sanctions, PEP status, corporate ownership, enforcement lists, and adverse news.

This function is fully integrated into NICE Actimize ActOne, the leading alert, investigation, and case management solution, allowing analysts to leverage the power of customer intelligence.

Anti-money laundering technologies have evolved significantly over the past few years. As a leader in the evolution of AML, where do you see next-generation anti-money technologies heading?

NICE Actimize recently introduced breakthrough anti-money laundering technology with a groundbreaking multi-layered approach to transaction monitoring. Built to detect more suspicious activity while reducing false positives, NICE Actimize’s SAM-10 introduces significant enhancements to its award-winning anti-money laundering solution, incorporating multiple layers of defense which strengthen the others and offer comprehensive coverage and detection of suspicious activity for financial institutions. The new solution ensures increased effectiveness for precise monitoring of both known and previously unknown, unmonitored typologies.

Aside from your technological contributions, NICE Actimize has recently demonstrated its commitment to human rights causes such as human trafficking. How is your technology expertise providing support to these issues? What are your plans to support these initiatives?

I think it is vital that banks and technology firms leverage the digital potency of the Cloud and AI-infused financial crime software to pinpoint human trafficking and other crimes. If we all work together, we can effectively intervene. NICE Actimize is a corporate sponsor of The Knoble, a well-respected nonprofit community of financial crime experts who unites law enforcement and financial institutions to identify best practices to fight what they call human crime – including human trafficking, child exploitation, scams, and elder abuse. Through Knoble initiatives, this network is beginning to collaborate, share intelligence, and mobilize targeted detection efforts with law enforcement.

By pooling our data and sharing our findings with like-minded crime fighters, the industry can make inroads in reducing these types of human crimes. Other efforts include the expanded implementation of education programs for our customers and the consumers they serve to help others detect criminal activity. But this is just the beginning.

If you could communicate one message to the global banking community, what would that be?

NICE Actimize has a long history of strong relationships with financial institutions across the universe of financial crime. We will continue to support our customers with innovation and a robust product roadmap as we continue to work together into the future.