For banks worldwide, financial crime is a massive challenge — one made more difficult by criminals’ rising use of digital technologies. PwC can now provide financial institutions with a powerful new tool — Digital Crime Fighters — which integrates 57 tools for countering financial crimes into one integrated platform. It was selected as a finalist in PwC’s Global Innovation Challenge 2019.
For financial institutions across the world, financial crime is a massive challenge. The bulk of this money is invested in anti-money laundering (AML), fraud, and sanctions programmes aimed at detecting criminals who are concealing the illegal sources of their funds.
In recent years, digitisation has put new tools in the hands of the money launderers. One of the banks’ main weapons in their battle with these criminals is transactional monitoring and surveillance systems. However, false positives remain a serious concern that impact the fight against digital crime.
“For banks, the answer isn’t having just one solution carrying out all the monitoring and surveillance, it’s having one platform to make everything work better.”
To support the banks’ efforts against money laundering, PwC US’s Financial Crime Unit (FCU) has combined digital innovation with years of client experience to create Digital Crime Fighters. Rather than being just a single solution, Digital Crime Fighters is a “marketplace of code”, of the type used in the military, pulling together various solutions into one integrated platform.
Prior to developing Digital Crime Fighters, the FCU had been helping a major global bank combat digital crime for a decade. That engagement provided many of the 57 different digital assets that now make up the platform, including advanced robotic investigation tools, integrated dashboards and closely-targeted risk assessments.
Digital Crime Fighters can now enable banks to respond to the changing risks around AML, fraud and sanctions in a more agile and coordinated way by bringing them three main benefits. First, giving their executives better insights. Second, making their systems work faster and more efficiently. And third, speeding up investigations.
Experience to date shows that the platform generates efficiency savings of between 30% and 60% during investigations, while also avoiding 80% of false positives1 and more often getting the ‘right’ alerts to possible money laundering operations. Innovative thinking has also gone into how the offering is being rolled out to clients. With the base platform being made available to many PwC clients, the more specialised apps are being offered on an individual. Software-as-a-Service subscription basis.
1 Source: PwC internal data
That’s why the PwC Global Innovation Challenge is commercially and client focused, leveraging what we know, through technology to deliver new ways of working, services, and products. In 2019, over 4300 innovators took part, submitting 273 solutions from 119 territories.
Victoria Huff Eckert
Global Innovation and New Ventures Leader, PwC US
Tel: +1 408 817 4136
Vikas Agarwal
Financial Crimes Digital Leader, PwC US
Tel: +1 408 817 4136