AI's Effect on Compliance
Recently read an interesting article regarding the future for those who work in “back office” roles”, especially in compliance. According to this article, big banks, such as HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan, spend well over $1bn a year each on regulatory compliance and controls.Thus, banks have turned to artificial intelligence to deal with compliance issues.
According to the article:
Senior executives from financial companies, 49% said they expect their firms to use AI for risk assessment within the next three years. Another 29% anticipate that their firms will apply AI to learn more about their clients and to prevent money laundering. Another 26% expect that AI will be used to help with regulatory as well as risk and compliance issues.
Will AI replace compliance in the future? How about other back office roles?
Personally, I do not think this is the case, I only think that AI will only be used as a tool for compliance departments to make work easier, but I am interested in seeing how AI will affect the overall banking industry.
effect*
and no, as seen above, AI can't detect nuance or context even if put in place as a safeguard.
As someone who works in AI, this is partly true. AI's can detect a lot more nuance/context than you think. NLP has come a long way. You just need to be using the right tools.
To understand the difficulty with using AI for something like compliance, you have to look at type 1 vs type 2 error (also known as false positive vs false negative). The most common difficulty that AI's face in these types of situations is too many false positives. AI's are quite good at detecting fraudulent behavior when there actually is fraudulent behavior. Unfortunately, AI's will often flag non-fraudulent behavior as fraudulent (generally speaking). This leads to over-auditing. This is partially mathematical and partially by design. False negatives, in most instances, are more catastrophic than false positives. Sure you waste more time if you get a lot of false positives but at least you aren't missing frauds.
At this stage an AI could not fully take over a compliance department. However, using AI you can greatly reduce the number of cases that compliance would have to look at. That's where the real value of AI comes in. You will almost never get false negatives but the cost of that is you'll end up having to sort through some more false positives in order to identify where the real problems are.
A valid point Deep, I suppose I'm just considering AI in the RIA compliance world--i.e. does this graphic constitute investment advice, does this phrase constitute a guarantee of investment returns, is this phrase potentially misleading, etc. You're probably right about applying it to different areas however. That said, I still hate dealing with the Business Prevention Unit (compliance) on any level.
It really depends on what people mean by AI. Most banks are using some sort of expert system, a bunch of hard-coded rules arranged as nested if-then lists, and that's a crude tool that will surface a lot of false positives. Which leads to a huge waste of time and money on the part of the bank and its analytics team.
The best thing to do is combine a rules engine with another filter based on some sort of unsupervised learning, like a neural network. With the manually coded rules, certain unusual behavior which banks know is legit can be allowed to proceed unflagged, other unusual behavior that is known to be illegal can be bucketed as illicit. The real problem is that hard-coded rules provide bad actors with an excellent feedback loop. You test, get blocked, and test again until the transaction goes through, at which point you exploit the breach.
One advantage of deep neural networks is that they can be trained in real time to detect new types of anomalous behavior, the unknown unknowns. You don't have to wait for a domain expert to come up with a new rule to catch fraud or money laundering. The data itself teaches the nets what's normal and what's not.
Thanks for that catch. Made the edit.
It's affect, lol.
And yes, AI will eventually get rid of just about all jobs.
AI is a great tool for analysis but it won't be replacing people in compliance type roles any time soon. And you're right about false positives--look at what happened with Soundcloud. They use Google's Content ID for copyright detection, and a lot of time end up tagging songs that are similar but are not actually copyrighted, or, in one case, it went as far as deactivating an artist's account because it detected the songs were copyrighted even though the artist who owned the copyright was the one uploading them on his official account. Problem apparently was that the account hadn't been cleared through the label side of things. So yes, AI is great for analysis but, at least for now, terrible for execution in context-driven sonarios.
My firm is working on automating back office and low level front office jobs. We are trying to slim the ranks down.
What tools are you using to do that?
In-house development and https://www.kensho.com/#/
Probably more to come as this is a more recent mandate.
One time I had to do some due diligence on the breast implant industry... AI probably wouldn't understand why I was looking at tits at work.
Had a similar experience with the vibrator industry.
Picking out issues from a dataset sure. However, relationships with client will always require some degree of intuition. Somebody in compliance will know that sometimes you need to bend the rules to maintain the relationship.
I should emphasize internal regs not legal...
back office people drones will literally be replaced by actual drones (in the form of AI)
Assumenda praesentium est natus ut. Veritatis illum beatae est molestiae. Fuga voluptas similique sint aut dolorum. Autem veritatis quasi velit quia ab atque. Veniam cum itaque est hic impedit.
Quasi nemo dolorem rerum. Odio quas aliquid sed ut et. Reiciendis eum culpa odit soluta.
Impedit eum deleniti ab ducimus sint. Beatae mollitia natus tempora repellat. Et consequatur exercitationem repellat id consectetur sit occaecati cumque.
At excepturi quia aliquid mollitia fuga et ut quos. Sunt dolores accusamus maiores voluptatum sit nihil. Qui non eveniet nihil dolor sit quaerat.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...