AI Report Digital - Flipbook - Page 10
Smarter Alerts
Valley National Bank, the bank unit of New York-based
patterns and reveal triggers that could indicate concerning
Valley National Bancorp, has partnered with Refine
behavior or generate a suspicious activity report filing. In
Intelligence, a provider of AI-powered software that analyzes
that regard, Barrett says the bank didn’t have to do much
transactions to quickly rule out false alarms.
in the way of formatting and managing its data ahead of
adding Refine to its process. The software also gives clear
Financial institutions can get bogged down by anomalous,
explanations for its recommendations, which the bank incor-
yet legitimate, customer transactions that trigger compliance
porates into its decisioning.
alerts — such as large deposits following a wedding or a
home sale. Those transactions could look suspicious in rules-
“It’s really being used in an assistive fashion. We don’t have
based internal systems, requiring investigations to resolve
the AI taking the decision [away] from us when it comes to
them and posing potential disruptions for customers, like
investigations that would typically take a lot of coordina-
account closures. But Refine’s technology builds customer
tion between branch and compliance teams,” Barrett says.
profiles that give the $60.9 billion bank context to understand
Instead, Refine’s software assists compliance investigators,
when a customer’s transaction is out of the ordinary but legit-
which he says “makes their lives a lot easier.”
imate, says Russell Barrett, Valley’s chief operations officer.
That’s yielded results. Since launching in 2023, investigation
Helping to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act and anti-mon-
time decreased from two weeks to two minutes by diverting
ey laundering rules is a popular use case of artificial intelli-
60% of AML-related issues to digital channels, according to
gence for banks. Large, uniform data sets create transaction
the bank.
AI IN THE REAL WORLD
By: Kiah Lau Haslett
Financial institutions have uncovered a variety
of uses for artificial intelligence, from analyzing
transactions to serving customers.
Cross-Organizational Uses
BNP Paribas has spent several years experimenting with arti-
Another place the bank has added AI is documentation man-
ficial intelligence and robotics. That’s resulted in a variety of
agement, which impacts all areas of the company. AI can
uses that help teams across the organization improve custom-
extract information from a variety of documents, including
er experience, increase efficiency and reduce risk, according
SWIFT messages, email, paper forms and PDFs. This appli-
to information shared by the global French bank.
cation processed about 300,000 documents annually as of
2022, with a goal of expanding that to over 1.5 million docu-
A natural language processing tool supports the bank’s
ments by the end of 2024.
human resources recruiters. The tool extracts unstructured
data from documents; its models were tailored to understand
To streamline and automate tax reconciliation, the bank uses
how information is presented on resumes. This helps recruit-
optical character recognition and data extraction technology
ers search through candidates and job descriptions across the
to read and extract data from PDFs, and formats and recon-
bank’s 64-country geographic footprint, translate job postings
ciles it before generating a user-friendly presentation using
into several languages and rank candidates by matching infor-
visualization tools.
mation in the resume to available jobs.
8 | FINXTECH INTELLIGENCE REPORT
