How EY Cognitive Investigator and AML Managed Services infused higher quality in transaction monitoring

Our global financial institution client was undertaking a large volume of anti-money laundering (AML) alert reviews — with over 100,000 complex cases investigated annually. It’s financial intelligence unit was built on a co-source model utilizing bank employees and contractors from several third-party services providers. Our client was looking to improve investigative quality, establish a data and metric driven oversight model, introduce leading edge automation into the investigative process and ultimately cut AML transaction monitoring costs.
 

The EY team was one of the client’s existing vendors — and the firm was impressed with both our track record and the AML technology solutions we brought to the table to make the end-to-end transaction monitoring investigations process more efficient. The client already viewed us as a trusted resource and decided to migrate all AML alert reviews for their firm’s commercial bank to Ernst & Young LLP.

We immediately began identifying pain points and bottlenecks in AML alert review processes as well as opportunities to streamline existing workflows and drive greater efficiency. To make the transition as smooth as possible for the client, we undertook a phased approach that allowed us to take on a steadily increasing alert volumes, thereby reducing transition risk.

We utilized our pod-based operating model to devote autonomous “pods” of EY analysts, quality control specialists and team leaders to the client. This model enabled our team to smoothly scale up resources as we assumed greater volumes, while also providing us with flexibility to readily scale down in the future if transaction and alert volume waned. Ultimately, over 300 EY analysts from our three US-based Service Delivery Centers (Jacksonville, FL, Alpharetta, GA & San Antonio, TX) were aligned to this effort.

We also deployed our Cognitive Investigator tool — part of our broader financial crime technology platform that hosts a suite of capabilities designed to harness artificial intelligence (AI), automation and natural language processing to enhance the financial crime investigations process. Cognitive Investigator’s capabilities were aligned to the client’s investigative processes and included:

• Performance monitoring – automated tracking and generation of key investigative KPIs and metrics
• Party review and normalization – automating consolidation of internal and external parties using our firm’s entity resolution capabilities
• Transaction sampling – providing automated, risk-based sampling to prioritize high-risk parties and transactions for review
• Internet research – preparing automated negative news, adverse media and internet-based research reports to provide insights and support rapid analyst decision-making on party-related risks
• Narrative generation – utilizing automated generation of draft investigative narratives

EY technology was configured to complement and integrate with the client’s existing technology and, at the client’s request, was deployed and operated on our secure Microsoft Azure cloud environment, allowing us to handle all updates, patches and scalability automatically on behalf of our client.