Cognitive Search & Analytics Prevents Money Laundering for a Leading Financial Intelligence Unit

The outcome

The 360° view approach employed by the financial intelligence agency provides an effective way to be more proactive in the fight against fraud. For example, imagine a comprehensive view of transactions, people, phone calls, email, and travel patterns, the connections between which reveal suspicious patterns that help investigators move a case forward. By automatically aggregating all of the information relevant to a given case across disparate repositories and data sets, investigators have better insight and a more complete view as to the likelihood that fraud has occurred, is occurring, or will occur. It helps focus investigative action to those transactions that are suspicious or even illustrate control weaknesses that could otherwise be exploited by fraudsters.

The approach effectively overcame what project managers refer to as the “unattainable triangle”, which maintains projects can only ever achieve positive results from two out of the three project attributes – i.e. quality, speed and cost. For example, a project that is high quality and fast can only come at great cost. Or a project that is fast and low cost will inevitably result in poor quality.

By leveraging Sinequa’s cognitive search and analytics platform, the agency was able to achieve speed and quality by enabling investigators to analyze more quickly and more accurately. They were also able to achieve low cost by avoiding the need to move the data, thereby avoiding the significantly higher costs (and risks) of a data migration project.