Strengthening the Fight Against Financial Crime
Introduction
Criminals launder over $40 billion through Canadian banks every year and only 0.01% of criminal activities are currently intercepted. During times of economic turbulence like recessions and pandemics, financial crime activities skyrocket. The onset of COVID-19 compelled the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Canada's largest bank, to seek a more powerful way of combating financial crime.
As part of RBC’s innovation program, we conceived and developed a tool to empower analysts to identify 4x as many criminals within public news.
Timeline
May 2020 - August 2020
Role
I designed this tool end-to-end: research, analysis, problem definition, product design, usability testing, and storytelling.
Team
1 Product Designer (me), 1 Data Scientist, 1 Developer, 1 Business Analyst
Introduction
Criminals launder over $40 billion through Canadian banks every year and only 0.01% of criminal activities are currently intercepted. During times of economic turbulence like recessions and pandemics, financial crime activities skyrocket. The onset of COVID-19 compelled the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Canada's largest bank, to seek a more powerful way of combating financial crime.
As part of RBC’s innovation program, we conceived and developed a tool to empower analysts to identify 4x as many criminals within public news.
Results
✅ Got buy-in from RBC’s VP of Financial Crime to fund this project.
🏆 Received an award for best product branding in program.
💰 Saved RBC $500,000 over the course of 5 years.
📜 RBC supported provisional patent for our ML models.
Initial problem
Banks can prevent criminals from becoming clients through extensive background checks. They can also track financial information to detect crime within RBC. However, it’s hard to know if a client has committed a financial crime at another bank or external organization - in which case RBC might not want them to continue being a client.
A special team of analysts sift through news and social media for financial crime-related information, comparing names with the RBC client directory. Matches are flagged and escalated, but with the overwhelming volume of daily posts and articles, analysts cannot detect every instance.
How can we support RBC analysts in getting qualified criminal leads from news and social media?
Goal
Increase the number of financial crime leads analysts are currently getting from news and social media.
Hypothesis
By scraping information from news articles and social media, and cross-referencing the names with the client directory, we expected to streamline the process for analysts to find relevant information easily.
Initial constraints
We consulted the stakeholders, lawyers and compliance team members to understand the main concerns regarding financial crime tools at the bank. Here are the main findings from those conversations:
We cannot scrape news websites and social media for data.
we cannot do background checks on a client without any reason to look into them.
Labeling a client as a potential financial crime risk should be done so very carefully and with significant cause. We cannot label someone as a financial crime risk if we don’t have reasonable cause to look into them.
We must be GDPR compliant as we have a head office in the UK and also serve clients in the EU.
So, decreasing the number of criminals through public news would be difficult to do without being able to look up clients or effectively scrape public news. So, we decided to talk to the analysts who work on this search daily.
Research
What are the struggles analysts face while trying to identify clients in financial crime news? I interviewed 20 analysts to dig into the current process of finding and reporting potential clients.
Research
What are the struggles analysts face while trying to identify clients in financial crime news? I interviewed 20 analysts to dig into the current process of finding and reporting potential clients.
Research
What are the struggles analysts face while trying to identify clients in financial crime news? I interviewed 20 analysts to dig into the current process of finding and reporting potential clients.
Research
What are the struggles analysts face while trying to identify clients in financial crime news? I interviewed 20 analysts to dig into the current process of finding and reporting potential clients.