Google Cloud Launches AML AI for Financial Institutions

Google Cloud has launched a new product, Anti Money Laundering AI (AML AI), which is an artificial intelligence-powered tool to help financial institutions detect money laundering, the company said Wednesday (June 21).

With estimates suggesting that money laundering accounts for 2-5% of global GDP, or up to $2 trillion annually, according to the United Nations, it is essential for financial institutions to have robust anti-money laundering programs in place.

“As threats become more sophisticated globally and the challenges in fighting money laundering become increasingly complex, we believe in the combination of AI and decision science as the best strategy to detect suspicious activity with more accuracy and efficiency,” said Rafael Cavalcanti, senior vice president of data and analytics, Bradesco bank of Brazil.

However, implementing such programs consumes significant resources for financial institutions, many of which operate across a variety of global and regional regulatory bodies. Moreover, most legacy AML monitoring products are reliant on manually defined rules, which yield low rates of identifying suspicious activities. This is where Google Cloud’s AML AI comes in. Google Cloud’s AML AI provides a 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 behavior, and Know Your Customer (KYC) data to identify instances and groups of high-risk retail and commercial customers. The product can adapt to changes in underlying data, delivering more accurate results, which increases overall program effectiveness and improves operational efficiency. It uses proprietary ML technology as well as Google Cloud technologies, such as BigQuery.

“Google is a pioneer in AI, and now we’re 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.

Google has been aggressive in its integration of AI into products and has plans to incorporate the technology into 25 products.