Napier AI Targets Critical Gaps in AML with Launch of Insights AI, Tested in FCA Supercharge Sandbox

Napier AI, a global leader in AI-powered financial crime compliance solutions, announces its latest AI innovations are available in product Insights AI, a new capability within their Transaction Monitoring solution designed to close critical gaps in anti-money laundering (AML) investigations. This follows extensive testing in the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Supercharged Sandbox.

Insights AI goes beyond the initial alert to surface clear, AI driven explanations of customer behaviour and the activity contributing to each task, reducing manual analysis and context switching for financial crime analysts. The insights are provided directly within transaction monitoring tasks to highlight behavioural patterns and surface potential new or emerging risk during investigation.

Napier AI recently presented its new approach to AI model testing under ‘Project Theseus’ as part of the FCA Supercharged Sandbox Showcase. Project Theseus included two tests: pattern mining and fluid dynamics, which use novel frequency-based AI algorithms on large-scale synthetic financial data sets to detect money-laundering typologies more effectively than traditional rules-bases systems, and with significantly reduced compute power.

On the basis of these discoveries, new AML transaction monitoring models were tested in the Supercharged Sandbox, and form part of the Napier AI Continuum platform where they are regularly tuned by the Napier AI data science team. These models and the alerts they generate for financial crime compliance teams, underpin the newly announced Insights AI feature in Napier AI Transaction Monitoring.

Dr. Janet Bastiman, Chief Data Scientist at Napier AI, commented: “Participating in the FCA Supercharged Sandbox allowed us to design and run new approaches to testing AI models for anti money-laundering. One of the biggest historical challenges in tackling complex money laundering typologies is the disconnected nature of the data required for pattern analysis along the complete lifecycle of a customer behaviour or transaction flow.”

“I was inspired by nature to find the flow, by learning from my peers in climate research and applying the fluid dynamics of sampling river water to the way money moves through the financial services ecosystem. We developed a methodology to detect the ripples in the transaction flow where money had been injected, even if we’re sampling downstream of that. And by applying the concept of the frequency and amplitude of waves to these “ripples” we were able to identify financial crime even when we were sampling further ‘downstream’ from the placement of illicit funds.”

Napier AI previously partnered with the FCA, The Alan Turning Institute and Plentitude on a synthetic-data initiative to address the lack of high-quality realistic data for money-laundering detection. This involved building a fully synthetic dataset based on anonymised real transactions and layered typologies against which financial institutions can train and test their financial crime compliance strategies. This led to the appointment of Dr Janet Bastiman, to the FCA’s Synthetic Data Expert Group to provide industry-expert input into how synthetic data can be safely used and governed.

Will Monk, Chief Product Officer at Napier AI, commented: “The launch of Insights AI is all about ensuring the incredible data science behind the scenes is leveraged in a way that puts the power into the hands of AML analysts, to make the best possible human-in the loop decisions for the alerts.”

“We lead with a compliance-first approach to AI in AML by partnering closely with the FCA so we can ensure our product aligns with regulatory guidance and meets policy goals around reducing the impact of economic crime on the UK.”