AI is both the weapon and the shield when it comes to financial cybercrime

As financial criminals leverage new sophisticated suites of accessible AI tools, savvy defenders in FinTech are racing to design systems to combat them. AI is being leveraged as the secret weapon in the battle against the toughest financial crimes, opening up opportunities for organizations to crack down with greater efficiency.  

According to Will Lawrence, Founder & CEO of Greenlite, a solution offering AI agents to automate repetitive financial compliance work, AI will play a key role in staying ahead in the fight against money laundering and financial crime.

Fighting the bad guys: "The bad guys always start using technology before the good guys can catch up," Lawrence says. "It’s really important that we start deploying the same tools they’re using to stay on top of things." A prime example of this challenge is the rise of synthetic identities, where criminals fabricate fake IDs to bypass Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. AI, according to Lawrence, can help organizations conduct more thorough investigations on customers who may not even be real, adding more research power to identify fraud before it causes harm.

Anti-money laundering: "The real area where AI is going to be most useful is in anti-money laundering, and the investigations that are usually done by human financial crime investigators," Lawrence explains. AML efforts are generally broken into two parts: detection and investigation. While risk detection through transaction monitoring and customer screening has become more automated, investigating the flagged leads is still an overwhelmingly manual process, requiring analysts to comb through unstructured data and documents.

"Generative AI is really going to help in that area," Lawrence says. "It’s going to bring much-needed support to that manual process."