LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, ZestFinance announces the release of a new anti-money laundering product, Zest for AML™, at the 16th annual ACAMS AML & Financial Crime Conference. Zest for AML enables lenders to prioritize and investigate alerts from their existing anti-money laundering systems, cutting investigation times by up to two-thirds and potentially saving millions of dollars for these organizations. Zest for AML also helps lenders adapt to new money laundering patterns and provides thorough documentation for regulators and other stakeholders.
Each year, lenders spend $8.9 billion1 and massive amounts of time investigating false positives for AML compliance. Current rules-based AML systems generate anywhere from 90%2 to 95%3 false positives, and the cost associated with following up on false positives has grown 50% over the last three years. Existing rules-based AML systems do a poor job of risk-ranking the large number of alerts they generate, leaving compliance personnel with more alerts to investigate than they can handle.
“Most AML technology on the market uses elementary math that can only consume a fraction of the data that’s available,” said Douglas Merrill, Founder and CEO of ZestFinance. “Zest for AML uses state-of-the-art math that can consume an almost infinite amount of data. With Zest for AML, lenders can immediately improve the insights and the quality of their alerts, ultimately making their AML compliance smarter and more efficient.”
Zest for AML collects the outputs from a lender’s existing anti-money laundering systems. It then calculates a risk-based ranking of alerts and provides a clear explanation as to how those rankings were determined. These risk rankings both guide compliance officers’ investigations of risky cases and help satisfy model validation and governance requirements.
For example, alerts that Zest for AML identifies as clear false positives can be automatically closed and the reasons why documented and annotated. For riskier alerts, Zest for AML provides a roadmap to guide further investigation. Compliance personnel will be better equipped than ever to investigate cases accurately and efficiently.
Zest for AML is available today. Pricing varies by organization, need and usage of the technology. To learn more about Zest for AML™, please visit www.zestfinance.com/AML.
About ZestFinance
ZestFinance, Inc. applies its unique credit-decisioning technology platform — based on data science and machine learning — to help lenders effectively predict credit risk so they can increase revenues, reduce risk and ensure compliance. ZestFinance was founded in 2009 by Douglas Merrill and a team of former Google employees with the mission of making fair and transparent credit available to everyone. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. For more information, visit www.ZestFinance.com.
Sources Mentioned in this Release
Global Radar article on AML compliance costs:
https://www.globalradar.com/aml-compliance-costs-how-much-is-enough/
Datavisor article on false positive alerts in AML systems:
https://www.datavisor.com/technical-posts/guest-post-end-the-false-positive-alerts-plague-in-anti-money-laundering-aml-systems/
Cognizant report on false-positive reduction techniques:
https://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/OFAC-Name-Matching-and-False-Positive-Reduction-Techniques-codex1016.pdf
1 Global Radar
2 Datavisor
3
Cognizant