With financial crime on the rise and compliance demands continuing to evolve, the financial services industry continues to face demanding risk and regulatory challenges. Whether it’s a previously undiscovered network of money launderers or a new set of compliance regulations to an impending regulatory examination, the requirement to clearly understand risk related to the firm's’ customers and their activities remains an elusive and unmet need within the industry.

Why?

With decades worth of investment, from KYC, customer screening, and customer risk assessment to transaction monitoring and case management, you would think the industry had the technology and solutions in place to meet their regulatory and risk obligations. The unfortunate truth: that’s not the case.  Criminals are smart and technology designed to discover their activities just hasn’t kept up with their methods, isn’t able to learn, and can’t predict where they’re operating, but that’s about to change.

How?

We see things differently. The Merlon Ecosystem is designed to leverage the latest in artificial intelligence and machine learning and plugs directly into current financial crime and compliance (FCC) solutions. Our solution based ecosystem will AI enable your current FCC solutions and will automate and augment their capabilities, making your customer onboarding, risk assessment and transaction monitoring capabilities smart, nimble and continuously learn from industry news, ongoing KYC reviews, monitoring and case management processes.

Ecosystem Benefits

• Reduced False Positives Across all FCC Functions
• Combat Financial Crime with Artificial Intelligence
• Increase the value of current FCC investments
• Automate Risk Ranking and Recommendations
• Eliminate Screening, Monitoring and Review Choke Points
• Understand, Automate, Recommend and Predict

Outcomes:

Intelligent screening

Every customer has a different story, some are interesting, some are confusing, and some are relatively simple. Regardless of their story, every new customer needs to be screened, their connections, background and business needs to be understood and their risk accurately assessed. This needs to be done quickly, efficiently and effectively.

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Intelligent list management

Sanction list management has become a complicated task for the financial crimes and compliance function within today's leading financial institutions. With sanction lists being supplied by US agencies such as Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), European lists such as Her Majesty’s Sanction Regimes and Global lists such as the UN Consolidated lists, managing these industry lists in addition to internal lists can become a risk management function on its own.

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intelligent assessment

Until recently, understanding customer risk has been relegated to KYC processes that relied on periodic risk assessments and semi-annual enhanced due diligence reviews. These processes used labor intensive information gathering tasks and manually intensive risk assessment functions. Neither are these steps effective nor efficient.

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Intelligent triage

Alerts are generated across the entire financial crimes and compliance workflow. From exceptions raised during customer onboarding, to KYC reviews and transaction monitoring, the alert triage process has become a costly undertaking for every compliance group within the financial services industry.

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Merlon Intelligent Screening

Every customer has a different story, some are interesting, some are confusing, and some are relatively simple. Regardless of their story, every new customer needs to be screened, their connections, background and business needs to be understood and their risk accurately assessed. This needs to be done quickly, efficiently and effectively.

With dozens of industry news sources, local, regional and global sanction lists, variations in customer names and geographical language complexities, the customer screening and onboarding function has become a manually intensive process across the industry. Errors and false positives only make the process that much more difficult and time consuming, often leading to a slow and costly customer onboarding experience.

AI is making the customer screening process effective and efficient. By using artificial intelligence, our Intelligent Screening solution semantically reads news and information from dozens of industry sources, automates topic categorization and resolves customer information with previously unattainable accuracy. This provides the compliance analyst with a unified customer onboarding experience, driven by AI, where customer risk is ranked based on a holistic view of the customers relationships, news and information, and recommendations are made using the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

With a single customer view, and all industry information accurately accumulated around the customer, the analyst can now make a quick and informed decision, whether to onboard the customer and why. And as every decision is made, our solution gets smarter and helps to accelerate subsequent reviews and recommendations.

** Formal Relationships with 3rd Party Data Providers Listed Below are Between Merlon Intelligence Customers and the Data Providers Themselves.

Merlon Intelligent List Management

Sanction list management has become a complicated task for the financial crimes and compliance function within today's leading financial institutions.

With sanction lists being supplied by US agencies such as OFAC, European lists such as Her Majesty’s Sanction Regimes and Global lists such as the UN Consolidated lists, managing these industry lists in addition to internal lists can become a risk management function on its own.

Not every list is the same and names rarely match.

What happens when lists are coming in from multiple geographies, global lists are being issued and internal lists are being developed, with names and entities showing up differently across these lists?

Names are often inaccurately matched, aliases are frequently missed and language variations complicate the process.

The net result, filtering systems often have an inaccurate list of names and entities to screen and fail to match sanctioned individuals which lead to significant regulatory exposure for the financial institution.

By using AI to accurately identify individuals across lists, and leveraging machine learning to recommend aliases and the probably of the names occurring across multiple sanction lists, our List Management solution automates and augments the list management function.

How?

Risk is dramatically reduced as the financial institution uses a single solution designed to manage all lists.

A single core list is automatically created and all names and entities are matched using industry leading entity disambiguation models that determine the probability of names, entities and aliases matching

Workflows that feed the banks local sanction filtering solutions become intelligent and automated, and AI is used to ensure sanction filtering list are precise, both locally and globally - across the financial institution.

Merlon Intelligent Assessment

Until recently, understanding customer risk has been relegated to KYC processes that relied on periodic risk assessments and semi-annual enhanced due diligence reviews.

These processes used labor intensive information gathering tasks and manually intensive risk assessment functions. Neither of these steps are effective nor efficient.

The opportunity to automate and augment the customer risk assessment process had been hindered by technological limitations and fragile rules based compliance and risk management systems.

AI is changing the customer risk assessment function. Because AI is underpinned by the idea of automation and augmentation, and with the maturation of machine learning models, customer risk assessment can now be achieved on an ongoing basis.

By continually analyzing industry news and information sources, understanding entities on sanction lists and collecting transactional activities and alert trending, The Merlon Intelligent Assessment solution continually aggregates and accumulates risk related information around each client.

Our Intelligent Assessment solution provides the continual customer risk information, making it possible to automate the following financial crimes and compliance functions:

-       Transaction Monitoring Threshold Setting

-       Activity Exception Reporting

-       Customer Risk Aggregation

With a single view of customer risk, that is compliance focused and continually updated, Merlon clients benefit from an AI driven customer risk assessment solution that is designed to continually understand customer risk, aggregate customer risk through a centralized customer risk repository, and feed downstream systems that need a clear and accurate customer risk assessment rating in order to perform monitoring and investigations processes that take place throughout the financial crime and compliance functions. 

Merlon Intelligent Triage

Alerts are generated across the entire financial crimes and compliance workflow. From exceptions raised during customer onboarding, to KYC reviews and transaction monitoring, the alert triage process has become a costly undertaking for every compliance group within the financial services industry.

And not every alert is created equal or should be treated equally.

This creates a workflow nightmare for the compliance analyst. With thousands of alerts being created nightly, and alert disposition requiring information from numerous systems (previous alerts, onboarding data, current news and screening information and case notes), the compliance analyst is with left with the task of whether to dispose, suppress or escalate an alert to a case, all while manually reviewing data from dozens of internal systems and data sources.

It’s not an easy task and fraught with errors.

Just one mistake can lead to a tremendous regulatory exposure, and there is a limit to how much responsibility a single compliance analyst can undertake. With limited information and legacy tools and technology, it’s only a matter of time. An alert will be disposed of for the wrong reason, and true positives will be overlooked.

Merlon Intelligent Triage is changing how alert triage is being conducted. By leveraging AI, our solution provides the analyst with a single triage experience, bringing all customer related information to the compliance analyst and aggregating and accumulating alert information around the customer, not just the transaction.

A Customer Centric View of an Alert

Ask any compliance analyst, a transaction centric view of an alert provides one piece of the alert triage process, but a customer centric view, with all customer related information accumulated around the alert provides an opportunity for previously unimaginable alert processing efficiencies and effectiveness.

And with all customer risk information organized around each alert, our Intelligent Triage solution then uses AI to augment workflow, rank risk and recommend next steps, including:

• Auto Risk Ranking
• Entity & Activity Risk Aggregation  
• Triage Trending (Hidden Networks)