Follow the e-money
A couple of years ago I remember going to see ComplyAdvantage to make a podcast with them. I thought the new category of regtech was interesting and that the potential for new technologies in that space (eg, machine learning) was significant, so I went of off to learn some more about and talk to a few organisations to test some hypotheses. I remember thinking at the time that they were good guys and on a good trajectory and it looks as if my opinion was well-founded (they are doubling in size this year).
Anyway, I was thinking about them because they recently sent me a new white paper “A New Dawn for Compliance” (which notes that an estimated $2 trillion is laundered globally every year and only 1-3% of these funds are identified and possibly stopped) and it nicely encapsulated something that has been touched on in a fair few conversations recently: there’s no way to hire ourselves out of the compliance mess we’re in. Even if financial services and other businesses had infinite compliance budgets, which they most certainly do not, it’s simply not feasible to hire enough people to keep up. Even if there were infinite people with expertise in the space, which there most certainly is not, bringing them on board is too time-consuming, too expensive and too inflexible to create a compliance infrastructure that can respond the new environment.
Technology is the only way out of this.
Using technology to automate the current procedures is, as always, only a small part of the solution. The UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU) receives more than 460,000 suspicious activity reports (SARs) every year (according to the National Crime Agency), yet fraud continues to rise.
Moreover as Rob Wainwright (head of Europol) pointed out last year, European banks are spending some €20 billion per annum on CDD with very limited results. In fact, he said specifically that “professional money launderers — and we have identified 400 at the top, top level in Europe — are running billions of illegal drug and other criminal profits through the banking system with a 99 percent success rate”. This is not even a Red Queen’s Race, it’s a Formula 1 of crime where the bad guys are ahead and we can’t overtake them.
The Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLDV) which comes into force in 2020 will, I predict, do nothing to change this criminal calculus. AMLDV will cost organisations substantially more than its predecessors and these costs are out of control. According to a 2017 whitepaper written by my colleagues at Consult Hyperion, KYC processes currently cost the average bank $60m (€52.9m) annually, with some larger institutions spending up to $500m (€440.7m) every year on KYC and associated customer due diligence (CDD) compliance. In the AMLDV era we will look back with nostalgia to the time when the cost of compliance were so limited.
It’s time for a rethink.
We need to re-engineer regulators and compliance to stop implementing know-your-customer, anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing and the tracking of politcally-exposed persons (let’s lump these all together for the sake off convenience as Customer Due Diligence, or CDD) by building electronic analogues of passport and suspicious transaction reports and so on. In a world of machine learning and artificial intelligence, we need to invert the paradigm: instead of using CDD to keep the bad guys out of the system, we should bring the bad guys into the system and then use artificial intelligence and pattern recognition and analytics to find out what the bad guys are doing and then catch them!
Surely, from a law enforcement point of view, it’s better to know what the bad guys are up to? Following their money should mean that it is easier to detect and infiltrate criminal networks and generate information that the law enforcement community can use to actually do something about the flow of criminal funds. In any other financial services business, a success rate of 1% would call into the question the strategy and the management of the business