Fraud and Financial Crimes Convergence: Technology

Many in the industry know that I'm a strong proponent of Fraud and Financial Crimes Convergence, so I'm often asked about just what organizations should do from a technology standpoint.

Julie Conroy, research director for Aite Group's Fraud & AML practice, and I recently sat down for a fireside chat to discuss just that topic as part of a three-part series on how to converge fraud and financial crime capabilities at your institution.

Check out this video as we discuss what you need to plan and implement to be able to converge fraud and AML technology. Keep reading for an excerpt from the video.

Julie: What are the key things financial institutions should be thinking about as they are evolving their technology backbone?

My top two would be as you are looking for your next generation solutions make sure that you have a unified and holistic data infrastructure that can be shared across both fraud and AML competencies so that you can leverage all of the commonalities of both internal and external data that can benefit your detection routines and investigations. Also, real time detection is table stakes at this point, and you have to have that real time detection and interdiction capability to keep up with the patterns of bad activity.

TJ, I know you are helping a lot of organizations with this journey, so what else should financial institutions be thinking about as they are applying technology to this challenge?

TJ: I wanted to expand on two of the points that you raised. One around the data and having a technology framework that allows you to harness the data. You need to be able to have flexibility in how you ingest the data, flexibility in how you combine the data, flexibility in how you optionally go out and look for other pieces of data that you might need in your decision flow process.

You can have all of the best intentions in the world, but at the end of the day, if your operational systems are unable to ingest and make business relevant or business contextual sense of that data in a way to let you make better decisions for your customers, you're going to fail the technology hurdle. That's one key area: make sure your technology investments have the flexibility to handle all of this variability in data.

The other aspect around that is analytics. We see analytics everywhere and a lot of organizations are investing in data scientists and teams who are building new analytic capabilities. Very often the deployment of those analytics becomes a challenge and that is one of the largest areas of investment here at FICO - building a platform that has the capability not only to deploy analytics but also to leverage flexibility around data ingestion.

Another area of investment that we have been doing is building up capabilities so that customers can build their own analytics to be deployed on the platform. They can leverage open source technologies as well as FICO proprietary technologies like InstantML. We're putting the power of FICO IP in the hands of customers to build analytics, so they can deploy models seamlessly on the platform and marry that with the data ingestion capabilities we offer. This is one of our keys to our future, one of the areas that we believe drives a lot of the convergence of fraud and AML.

Julie, are there other technology areas that people should be exploring as they look at this convergence topic?

If you're dying to know Julie's take on that question, make sure to watch the video. We also recently shared another part of this series where focus on data. Watch the video here.

Come back to watch the last video where we discuss considerations regarding people and processes.

Follow me on Twitter @FraudBird for more updates on the latest fraud topics.