The use of AI in combatting financial crime

Panellist at a session convened by Standard Chartered’s Financial Crime Surveillance Operations, on the opportunities and pitfalls of applying artificial intelligence to financial crime detection. Alongside speakers from Deloitte and UEM Sunrise.

· from the archive

Financial crime surveillance is one of the few places where an institution is already comfortable acting on the output of a model it cannot fully explain: an alert is raised, a human reviews it, and the decision is documented. That makes it a useful test of what AI governance has to answer for in practice rather than in principle.

The pitfalls discussed are the ones that recur: models that drift without anyone noticing, alert volumes that rise faster than the team reviewing them, and the difficulty of showing a regulator how a decision was reached when the reasoning sits inside a system nobody in the room built.