The human mind is wonderful yet rather mysterious. What the mind looks for determines what it is able to see. Researchers who were looking into this phenomenon, known in the field as “inattentional blindness,” presented oncologists with radiology scans. The doctors, all of them highly experienced, successfully spotted cancerous masses in most of the images—but they failed to see the rather prominent image of a gorilla that the researchers had placed in each scan. The doctors were so focused on what they were looking for that they simply did not see what else, or rather who else, was present in the image.

Lessons learned from this experiment can be applied to the fight against financial crime. For many of the world’s leading banks, fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) teams remain separate. The risk of this traditional “two teams” approach is that both teams may be missing the metaphorical gorilla in their data.

Featurespace Head of Financial Crime, Araliya Sammé, discusses three benefits financial institutions can see from converging their fraud and AML teams.

Read more at ACAMS Today.