Laundering money and funding terrorism cannot withstand analytics and AI

Despite banks’ substantial investments in technology, people and processes to meet regulations, they currently lack effective and efficient systems for tackling financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorist financing. Regulators cannot keep pace with change, and the time and investment to overhaul banks’ legacy systems are too great given the complexity of global organizations and inevitable disruption to operations. But the three elements — technology, people and process — match EY’s strengths in technology consulting, especially when paired with deep financial services industry and risk and compliance expertise. EY continues to invest and evolve its financial crime (FinCrime) practice as it listens to financial institutions’ demands for services that embed regulatory compliance expertise and technology innovation, offered at scale on an outcomes-based pricing model. EY’s FinCrime practice collaborates across the firm to combine legacy capabilities and emerging technologies to differentiate from competitors’ portfolios in the market and provide, in TBR’s current analysis, industry-leading offerings.

EY’s connected approach to disrupting financial crime: Technology disruption, industry collaboration and process innovation

Over the course of EY’s two-day Financial Crime Analyst Summit, the firm’s leaders and banking sector clients spoke with TBR about the challenges financial institutions face, including high operating costs, stifled revenue growth, and demands to undergo business transformation while maintaining compliance with evolving regulations. Many industries contend with the first two challenges, but this last one — transforming while complying — fits well with EY’s strengths: industry expertise, emerging tech capabilities, and a deep understanding of the regulators in the U.S. and globally. In applying those strengths, EY’s financial crime practice relies on three pillars — technology disruption, industry collaboration and process innovation — in other words, meet demand for services and solutions that are backed by regulation credibility, infused with technology innovation and offered with tiered pricing to successfully disrupt FinCrime.

Before getting to the specific ways that EY addresses FinCrime, one key aspect of the financial services market as a whole deserves extra attention: trust. In the consulting and technology spaces, trust has come to mean delivering on promises and securing data. In the banking space, with the additional weight of money and regulators, trust becomes the single most important factor in determining the extent of a provider-client relationship. With a heritage as a trusted auditor, a reputation for delivering consulting services, and a position between clients and regulators, EY has built up enough trust capital to take on industrywide challenges.