Turning financial crime compliance into a strategic advantage

More businesses are turning to financial crime managed services to meet their obligations with greater reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness than traditional models or business process outsourcing. Gartner reports; 70% of organisations are turning to managed services providers to access specialised skills that are not available in house.

The core benefits include improved quality outcomes and higher right first-time compliance rates, but also agility and the expertise needed to respond to a rapidly changing regulatory environment. Managed services enable innovation through new technologies, access to global talent pools offering flexible surge capacity, and faster reaction times to regulatory changes.

But the benefits of a managed service model can extend much further. Crucially, this is also an opportunity to enhance the client experience by fixing onboarding friction. Currently, 70% of financial institutions report losing clients as a result of onboarding delays, and 40% are facing customer due diligence bottlenecks. Managed services can automate ID verification and know your customer (KYC) screening and harnessing new technologies to enhance risk scoring enables faster onboarding, higher conversion rates, and lower abandonment —giving you an edge over slower competitors.

We believe the competitive potential can go much further than this. For starters, the data gained by the managed services provider can offer valuable insights, particularly in corporate banking. Of course, this concept isn’t new; financial institutions have been trying to use compliance data to enhance client insight and identify sales opportunities for a long time. But results have been hampered by a siloed approach to gathering information, as well as the challenge of looking at compliance data through a commercial lens. 

This is changing. AI offers a breakthrough, allowing you to connect the dots and extract previously hidden commercial leads. It can cut through fragmented bank data, matching checks and sanctions screening with transaction records, as well as unstructured external data feeds in areas such as deals and new product launches. This rich insight can help relationship managers initiate conversations, target products and services, and develop customised solutions. For instance, you could proactively approve local currency credit lines that are available as soon as the client moves into a new market.    

At PwC, we’re already seeing the value of AI-powered insights to transform both front and back-office functions. Mirroring the possibilities opening up in financial crime, our teams have deployed and tested agentic AI in areas such as financial planning and analysis (FP&A). The results are enhancing the quality of the business advice delivered by CFOs and their teams, as well as improving their ability to anticipate threats and opportunities. We’re now turning these learnings into tangible outcomes for our clients—strengthening financial crime prevention, unlocking deeper insights, and enabling more proactive, informed decisions.

We’ve also applied these new capabilities within our own business operations, implementing robust measures to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. We’re now taking what we’ve learned transforming ourselves and sharing it as we work with our clients.  

How can your organisation capitalise on these new possibilities? Three priorities stand out:

1. Rethink the role of financial crime within your business  

Start by identifying the full, untapped value potential of financial crime operations.  

Traditionally, the chief focus has been compliance-first defence. With greater assurance over compliance, you can begin to look at what more you can offer the business and the capabilities you need to deliver.

Key opportunities include harnessing the data collected and generated by more advanced systems to track patterns of customer behaviour, how transactions flow, geographies in which clients operate, the relationships they have, and the products they use.  

The businesses out in front are going to be using this data to improve customer segmentation, identify potential high value clients that haven't been flagged through more traditional means, and target those customer relationships. They can also use the insights to support strategic commercial decisions—"what new products do we need, what markets should we serve, and what kinds of customers do we want to target”?  

2. Redefine your technology strategy  

From comprehensive screening to eliminating false positives, AI and automation are already making a crucial difference to the efficiency and effectiveness of Financial Crime monitoring.  

But the real value of new technology doesn’t just lie in doing what you already do a little better. The bigger prize is augmenting capabilities and opening up opportunities for innovation. A key part of this is looking at how AI can support a rethink of what the function delivers, and how relevant data can be captured and analysed in the most effective way. This added value will in turn strengthen the business case for investment.

3. Choose the right partner  

The right partner can help you gain access to the technology, specialised expertise, and innovative delivery model needed to reposition financial crime risk management within your business and make the most of the competitive benefits.  

We see digital initiatives fail often because risk and compliance teams aren’t sufficiently aligned with front-office teams and the speed of innovation slows as a result. Partnering with an experienced, trusted managed service provider would allow you to drive innovation without creating uncontrolled regulatory exposure.

Trust matters, and is crucial in financial services. Effective financial crime controls deliver competitive advantage through increasing trust with customers, investors, and partners. The rigidity and low-value focus of old style BPO would struggle to meet these demands. By contrast, our managed service model is built around the agility, strategic focus, and ability to work alongside business teams needed to deliver a future-fit operation.

We’re at a decisive moment. Embracing the possibilities opened up by AI will unlock new opportunities and enable smarter client conversations—turning Financial Crime risk management from a control function into a key growth driver.

If you’d like to explore how our financial crime managed services can run your operations with tech and talent—so you can run faster, scale smarter, and lead stronger—please get in touch.