New Ventures: 2019 Global Innovation Challenge Finalist

Setting the scene

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.

How we helped

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.

Impact and potential

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}