Bank of NZ pioneers Intel’s AI-based money laundering detector

The Bank of New Zealand has become one of the first users of Intel’s Saffron platform

The Bank of New Zealand has become one of the first users of Intel’s Saffron artificial intelligence based money laundering detector, joining Intel’s Saffron Early Adopter Program.

The bank’s director of products and technology, David Bullock, described Saffron as “truly bleeding edge technology that will enable us to understand our customers far better than we ever have before and help them make smarter decisions”  

He said Saffron would enable the bank to take advantage of its existing big data platform to glean increasingly sophisticated insights for innovative customer service.

Intel says money laundering fines imposed on financial institution have topped to US$360 billion in the past decade and it cites UN estimates that money laundering accounts for between two and five percent of global GDP, $800 billion to $2000 billion annually.

Saffron was launched in California on 12 October with Intel describing it as “the first associative memory AI solution specifically tailored to the needs of financial services institutions and optimised on Intel Xeon scalable processors.”

According to Intel, Saffron’s associative memory AI “simulates a human’s natural ability to learn, remember and reason in real time [mimicking] the associative memory of the human brain to surface similarities and anomalies hidden in dynamic, heterogeneous data sources, while accessing an infinitely larger data set than its human counterparts.”

According to Intel, unlike traditional machine learning methods, Intel Saffron AML Advisor does not require domain specific models nor training and retraining, resulting in improving the time to insight.

“The financial services industry faces the challenge of “What will be important tomorrow?” In this dynamic landscape, actionable insights realised in hours or days rather than weeks or months is an imperative,” Intel said.

Intel said Saffron would pave the way for “white box AI” in enterprise applications designed to enhance decision-making in highly complex tasks.

Early results indicate they can catch money launderers with unprecedented speed and efficiency,” Intel said.

The vice president and general manager of Intel’s Saffron AI Group, Gayle Sheppard, said investigators and analysts would come to depend on transparent AI solutions to meet the ever-growing demands of consistency and efficiency from a business, regulatory and compliance perspective.

“The amount of data that banks and insurers collect is growing at massive scale, doubling every two years. While the quantity of data is growing, so are the types and sources of data, which means today much of the data isn’t queried for insights because it’s simply not accessible with traditional tools at scale.”

 

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