AML/Fraud solution of the year: Quantexa

Asia Risk Awards 2021

As fraudsters become more sophisticated, traditional rules-based monitoring methods to detect and investigate financial crime and fraud are no longer viable. These methods tend to be too reactive and disconnected, often hindering financial institutions from seeing the bigger picture. 

Transaction monitoring systems for anti-money laundering (AML) threats, which trigger an alert when a transaction hits a certain threshold for rules or scenarios, often result in human investigators dealing with too many false positives. 

Similarly, fraud threats continue to evolve, so having cross-channel intelligence in real time is critical to the effectiveness of any response. 

More relevant data or context is needed to shift to a proactive approach to finding and disrupting financial crime. 

This is where Quantexa’s Contextual Decision Intelligence platform comes in. Alexon Bell, chief product officer at Quantexa, says the CDI platform helps fix the data problem within an organisation by creating a single customer view, enriching customer and counterparty data with external sources, and making connections between them. 

This enriched information puts data in context and gives considerable uplift to data science. Current systems may have 100 inputs of features, but CDI can provide 500 to 1,000 features to the data science team. This could provide relevant insights, such as the counterparty to a shell company or a director of the counterparty business connected to a certain watch list. 

“The CDI platform is not just for AML, fraud and financial crime. It also helps with credit risk, fraud and marketing by delivering the equivalent enriched information to these people and systems,” says Bell. 

Using Quantexa’s CDI platform, customers achieve 60 times faster data resolution, 90% greater model accuracy, and can scale to more than 60 billion data records, compared with traditional approaches. Organisations that use Quantexa can reduce fraud losses, tackle crime syndicates, manage first party risk, detect mule accounts and accelerate investigation outcomes.

Quantexa’s technology supports multiple uses from a single platform, including its AML solutions, which cover financial crime investigations, trade, capital markets and correspondent banking. Quantexa’s AML solutions help customers focus on the biggest risks by reducing false positives, lowering the cost of compliance and improving the efficiency of AML and investigation processes by automating millions of decisions. 

Quantexa’s fraud solution helps customers outsmart criminals with a contextual approach to fraud detection software that enables teams to see beyond a payment, transaction, claim, individual or single company, and distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent behaviours.

Standard Chartered, for example, has partnered with Quantexa to amplify its anti-financial crime efforts globally. 

Quantexa supports Standard Chartered’s financial crime team by using dynamic entity resolution, network analytics and contextual data. Through the Quantexa platform, Standard Chartered can bring its extensive data on a single platform, connect the dots within the data and construct a more holistic view of parties, transactions and interrelated associations. 

By automating and simplifying highly labour-intensive and manual processes, the bank’s investigators can devote more time to focus on finding true risk.

Another example is HSBC’s Global Social Network Analytics platform, which is enhanced with Quantexa’s entity resolution and network analytics capabilities, allowing the bank to make more informed decisions. 

The platform integrates seamlessly into existing IT ecosystems, with flexible deployment options – native or containerised for private and public cloud. 

The Quantexa team has extensive experience across AML, financial crime, regulatory trends and financial markets. It has more than 300 employees, including data and analytics experts and specialists in financial crime, fraud, customer intelligence and compliance. 

The firm now serves banking, insurance and government sectors in more than 70 countries and has opened Asia-Pacific regional offices in Melbourne, Australia and Singapore. 

Quantexa has also recently launched Syneo, a contextual monitoring platform. Syneo offers a new ‘investigate to detect’ approach based on actionable intelligence. It is a complete, end-to-end platform for system-led risk detection, including monitoring, alert management and investigations. In time-sensitive solutions, the platform can return a set of results in a matter of hours rather than weeks. 

In the next 12 months, Bell says Quantexa will add unstructured data, such as news, to provide additional context to decisions and potential early warnings for know-your-customer, investigations and detection. It will also enable connectivity for real-time solutions by using Kafka, an open-source event and data streaming platform. This allows information to be disseminated more easily and wider across the organisation. 

Quantexa will also enhance the existing native script for Entity Resolution, with transliteration capabilities. This will provide a global view to be incorporated across all sources that may not be in English. 

An Asia Risk Judge noted that financial institutions are very good at collecting data but don’t fare well in connecting relevant pieces of data, except in hindsight. “Quantexa’s proposition is very impactful in that it fills exactly this gap in the internal competency of financial institutions, and it makes all the difference between detecting and preventing financial crimes versus dealing with the aftermath,” the judge said.