Google Cloud launches AI-powered AML product for financial institutions

By Delisha Fernandes

Google Cloud announced the launch of Anti Money Laundering AI (AML AI), an Artificial Intelligence-powered product designed to help global financial institutions more effectively and efficiently detect money laundering.

Money laundering is a complex problem with a growing global impact. The money laundered yearly is estimated to be 2-5% of global GDP, or up to $2 trillion annually.

Most legacy AML monitoring products are reliant on manually defined rules, which yield low rates of identifying suspicious activities. In fact, more than 95% of system-generated alerts turn out to be “false positives” in the first phase of review, with approximately 98% never culminating in a suspicious activity report (SAR).

“Google is a pioneer in AI, and now we are making our tools, technologies, and expertise available to solve one of the biggest and most costly challenges in the financial services industry,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Building on our commitment to bring AI-powered innovation to the financial services industry, we are launching Google Cloud’s AML AI to help financial institutions more accurately and efficiently identify AML risk while enhancing business operations and governance.”

Google Cloud’s AML AI provides a consolidated machine learning (ML)-generated customer risk score as an alternative to rules-based transaction alerting. The risk score is based on the bank’s data, including transactional patterns, network behaviour, and Know Your Customer (KYC) data, to identify instances and groups of high-risk retail and commercial customers.

“Google Cloud’s AML AI has significantly improved HSBC’s AML detection capability. Google’s models are already demonstrating the tremendous potential of machine learning to transform anti-financial crime efforts in the industry at large,” said Jennifer Calvery, Group Head of Financial Crime Risk and Compliance at HSBC.