Global bank Citi is working with multinational professional services firm EY and artificial intelligence solutions provider SAS to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) based risk analytics scoring engine to provide more context and usable data to help decision makers review trade transactions.

The NextGen project aims to help streamline the time-consuming manual processes associated with reviewing high volumes of global trade transactions while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Advanced analytics

Citi already digitises millions of trade-related pages annually with optical character recognition.

NextGen will deploy advanced analytics and natural language processing to sift through data to better understand networks of related parties, unstructured data and customer activity over time.

Global head of trade for Citi treasury and trade solutions, John Ahearn, says “we process 9 million transactions annually, and the NextGen project will help us optimise our processes from the back office to the front, by expanding the use of digitisation, automation and advanced analytics.”

Overwhelming complexity

Vice president of fraud and security intelligence at SAS, Stu Bradley, says banks face almost overwhelming scale and complexity in the trade-finance sector and in compliance activities.

“SAS’ sophisticated analytics platform will help Citi drive more effective and efficient monitoring of trade transactions,” he claims. “The resulting performance and enhanced risk insights should lead to a better risk posture, improved response times for monitoring, and reduced operational costs,” he concludes.