AI Forensics Takes Aim at Compliance Gridlock

Watch more: Digital Shift With Flagright’s Madhu Nadig

Scale is fast becoming a central challenge in financial crime compliance.

As digital payments expand and real-time transactions accelerate, the number of alerts generated by fraud detection and anti-money laundering (AML) systems has surged beyond what human analysts can reasonably and cost-effectively investigate.

The result is a growing operational dilemma. Institutions must meet strict regulatory expectations while simultaneously coping with overwhelming workloads.

“FinTechs, banks and payment providers today are dealing with alert volumes that grow faster than their teams can handle,” Flagright co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Madhu Nadig told PYMNTS. “Every screening hit, every transaction monitoring hit needs to be investigated, even though a significant portion turns out to be nothing. Resource requirements rise faster than teams can scale.”

This phenomenon, known as “alert overload,” has become one of the most persistent operational bottlenecks in financial crime compliance. In response, a new category of technology that uses artificial intelligence is beginning to take shape inside compliance teams.

“AI forensics is a family of specialized AI agents, each purpose-built to perform a specific investigator task across AML compliance and fraud prevention,” Nadig said. “You can think of them as digital investigators that follow your institution’s standard operating procedures exactly the same way your analysts follow them, but they can execute them autonomously at scale and in a few seconds.”

Moving From Detection to Investigation to Solve the Alert Overload Problem

The investigative capacity of financial institutions has typically grown more slowly than their actual compliance needs. A team of analysts might be able to investigate roughly 1,000 alerts in a week, for example, but if the institution’s systems generate several thousand alerts during that same period, a backlog forms immediately and can continue to grow.

“A human analyst cannot scale beyond a certain point,” Nadig said. “They need that time to make the judgment call.”

AI forensics systems address this in two primary ways. First, AI agents can assist analysts by gathering information and preparing investigative summaries. That reduces the time analysts spend pulling data across multiple systems. The second approach is full autonomy for low-risk alerts, allowing AI agents to automatically investigate and close them.

“AI agents can pre-investigate alerts for you and bring the average investigation time from something like five minutes to maybe a minute,” Nadig said.

“If you have a backlog of 100,000 alerts, you will need a large team just to clear that backlog,” he added. “For low-risk alerts, you can deploy these agents autonomously, and they will, in a matter of minutes, clear out your backlog.”

The Operational Mechanics of AI’s Digital Investigators

A crucial design principle behind AI forensics platforms is that they can operate according to an institution’s own procedures rather than imposing a generic investigative framework or functioning as a black-box decision engine.

Every financial institution maintains detailed standard operating procedures (SOPs) outlining how alerts should be investigated. These documents define the data sources analysts must review, the steps required to evaluate suspicious activity, and the criteria for closing alerts or escalating them to regulators.

“All AI forensics needs is for the institution to upload their SOP into the platform,” Nadig said. “The system will go through the SOP and automatically configure the agent for you.”

Once configured, the AI agent performs the same investigative steps an analyst would normally execute, including gathering information, summarizing evidence and assessing risk indicators. Institutions can review and adjust those workflows before deploying them.

“You can back-test it with your historical data to see how this agent would perform, then compare it with your analyst dispositions and decide whether you want to deploy it or not,” Nadig said.

Financial institutions have long relied on rules-based monitoring systems, which remain essential for regulatory compliance, and AI does not replace them.

“Rules are not the enemy,” Nadig said. “A well-crafted rule that says, ‘Flag a cash transaction above $10,000,’ is fast, transparent and meets a regulatory requirement in an extremely explainable way.”

The operational challenge, however, arises once the rule generates an alert.

“Rules can generate alerts for behaviors indicative of financial crime, but they cannot investigate them,” Nadig said. “They tell you something happened. Then you need investigative capability.”

AI agents can step into that downstream investigative layer, gathering context and analyzing evidence before presenting a conclusion to human reviewers. In practice, this creates a layered architecture. Rules generate alerts, and AI investigates them and can ultimately hand them off to a human user.

The result is not fewer investigators but better ones, Nadig said.

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.