The Featurespace team spent their time at the Aite-Novarica Group’s Financial Crime Forum.  The event brought industry leaders, regulators, and the vendor community together to discuss a wide array of #FINCRIME topics based around three major themes, Fraud, Authentication, and AML.  The conference kicked off with Brian Krebs, American Journalist and Investigative Reporter, discussing the continued and evolving threat of the dark web and the impact this growing marketplace of dark web data has on compromising accounts.   As data from the dark web is being used against financial institutions, a central theme at the event was around using a combination of internal and external data coupled with a more adaptive analytics strategy to combat fraud and money laundering.

Over the course of the two-day conference, it was clear that financial institutions are taking control of their own destiny and moving away from purely rules based fraud and AML detection, and are embracing machine learning and behavioral analytics.  Additional sessions covered many of the reasons for this continued shift, which includes; customer friction, faster payments, and regulatory pressure/guidance.  These forces are driving financial institutions to embrace new technology and analytic methods.

But before new analytic approaches can be adopted, understanding the data available to the financial institution is crucial. The Aite-Novarica Group’s Financial Crime Forum focused on both internal and external data as part of an overall strategy, which  was highlighted in the session entitled “Open Platforms: Orchestrating Fraud and AML Detection.” This session offered powerful insights into bringing fraud and AML data into a single place to enhance the value that both teams get from an orchestration layer. Citing examples such as using KYC data for understanding wire instructions, how a customer with a mortgage is less likely to be committing first party fraud, etc.  In this session, Featurespace’s Founder, David Excell, discussed how once all of the most critical fraud and AML data is in a single orchestration layer, looking at the entire customer journey as a whole will allow a financial institution to protect the customer holistically as opposed to just looking at a single channel each time a questionable transaction is raised.

We also learned of newer ways that financial institutions are fighting fraud, such as the relatively recent eCBSV electronic Consent Based Social Security Number Verification, introduced as part of new legislation and “allows permitted entities to verify if an individual’s SSN, name, and date of birth combination matches Social Security records.  Regulations in other parts of the world were also discussed, in a session entitled “The Weakest Link: The Impact of Scams on Trust” panelists discussed how specific European regulations are driving additional consumer protections and fraud controls, some of which can and should be embraced by US Financial Institutions to reduce the impact of fraud on customers.

Overall it was a very informative and engaging few days and we thank Aite-Novarica Group for hosting such a terrific event.  And speaking of events, the Featurespace Team will be presenting at ACAMS so please register for our breakfast session AML Transaction Monitoring Redefined – ACAMS Knowledge Breakfast (featurespace.com).