Technology vendor of the year: NICE Actimize

Asia Risk Awards 2021

Lee Garf, NICE Actimize

Continuous innovation and integration of the latest advancements in technology are important in many aspects of capital markets, but it is particularly important in helping firms mitigate all forms of financial crime – both internal and external threats.

This is exactly what NICE Actimize has done across its entire financial crime risk portfolio, including holistic surveillance and anti-money laundering (AML).

Its solutions help financial service organisations remain compliant, especially as global regulations continue to evolve. The solutions also strengthen firms’ effectiveness in the fight against financial crime, particularly addressing key issues in some jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific region around monitoring employee misconduct.

Lee Garf, general manager, financial markets compliance, at NICE Actimize, says the firm is focusing on using artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance and develop better solutions.

“We continue to make significant investments across our entire compliance and surveillance portfolio, with a focus on further developing artificial intelligence-based solutions that enhance the quality and consistency of surveillance programmes. As we work to fight misconduct, meet ever-changing regulatory requirements, and reduce risk to financial services organisations, our customers can expect continued advancements,” he says.

One trending approach towards financial crime is to use a holistic risk-based approach. Firms want to break down siloes in financial crime, risk and compliance functions. Transaction monitoring, screening, know-your-customer and customer due diligence need to work together to be more effective.

At the heart of this is data. More accurate data and customer profiles, and capturing the right data at the right time, are essential in achieving effective monitoring and detection.

NICE Actimize continues to invest in its AI and machine learning capabilities to make better sense of data, holistically understand the customer across their lifecycle, and ultimately provide precision in monitoring and detecting suspicious activity.

Stephen Taylor, NICE Actimize

Stephen Taylor, general manager, AML, at NICE Actimize, says financial service organisations are looking for an always-on, always reliable and holistic risk engine to better understand their customers.

“We at NICE Actimize are developing a solution that will become increasingly important to financial service organisations in their continued drive to make sense of customers and their risks,” he adds.

The risk profile will extend beyond AML and fraud, and can be used to assess customer credit risk or offer insight on potential opportunities for new products or services.

NICE Actimize’s solutions are built on a common open and extendible platform that provides functionality, stability and robustness across its portfolio. The platform enables the use of proven advanced analytics, machine learning and AI.

It is noteworthy that the platform does not dictate how and where to apply AI techniques. Instead, it enables NICE Actimize’s teams and customers to use it everywhere and wherever they want. This philosophy allows NICE Actimize to meet its clients wherever they are on their analytics and AI journey.

NICE Actimize’s systems allow customers to either plug in their own AI models or use NICE Actimize or other vendors in an ad-hoc fashion to consume externally developed AI.

Capital markets firms still face compliance challenges, especially if remote-working environments are to continue.

NICE Actimize has updated its holistic surveillance solutions by increasing data integrations, improving detection analytics, and enhancing AI capabilities. The solution is also available in the cloud, allowing firms to scale their surveillance function and be up and running in weeks, instead of months.

Our push to [the] cloud and our integration with Microsoft Teams have proven to be very beneficial to our clients as they attempt to remain compliant with regulatory requirements

Lee Garf, NICE Actimize

Garf says it is likely that many firms will continue adopting a hybrid work model, with some teams working remotely, and others returning to an office.

“This means compliance teams will have added challenges when it comes to detecting and preventing misconduct. Our push to [the] cloud and our integration with Microsoft Teams have proven to be very beneficial to our clients as they attempt to remain compliant with regulatory requirements,” he says.

This is where AI and natural language processing (NLP) will be more vital in providing tools to capture and monitor data.

By using NLP trained with terabytes of financial industry-related data, NICE Actimize’s systems can understand the context within conversations across email, chat, voice, trade data and more.

NICE Actimize’s SURVEIL-X holistic surveillance solution uses AI-powered predictive algorithms to analyse data across a wide range of behavioural, trading and communication risk factors to identify unusual behaviour. The solution then uses supervised and unsupervised machine learning to co-relate the early warning signals to past known rogue trading cases, assess each regulated employee’s risk and assign an associated risk score.

This allows firms to detect potentially bad behaviour in advance by identifying traders who may have a propensity to act recklessly.

For AML, Taylor says that NICE Actimize combines expert rules required for regulatory compliance and machine learning analytics to complement its domain expertise.

“The combination of both lower false positives and improved predictability in anti-money laundering using AI technologies dramatically improves the efficiency of AML teams, making NICE Actimize highly sought as a solution provider,” he says.