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Despite more stringent anti-money laundering (AML) regulation over the past decade, combating financial crime continues to be a major problem for financial institutions. Natwest is the latest bank to be under regulatory scrutiny but there have been a multitude of incidents during the past year as the pandemic accelerated the pace of digitalization which in […]

In 2015 machines could “see” better than humans and in 2016 AlphaGo learned to play Go and beat Lee Sedol. By 2018 Waymo launched the world’s first self-driving taxi service, and in 2020 GPT-3 learned the internet. It is clear that the pace of AI innovation is accelerating exponentially, and this is only a glimpse […]

Many have said that little progress has been made in the fight against financial crime. In fact, there is a solid argument that we are regressing:  Spending more money with fewer results Focusing on the symptom of “false positives” rather than the disease itself Focused on the rule rather than the spirit of the law, […]

Symphony AyasdiAI has been innovating in the artificial intelligence domain for over a decade. Only a handful of companies on the planet can say that today. From Ayasdi’s beginnings out of the Stanford math department, the technology’s potential impact across multiple industries and problems has been unquestionable. This is why DARPA funded its development and […]

It is now well understood that in order to make Artificial Intelligence broadly useful, it is critical that humans can interact with and have confidence in the algorithms that are being used. This observation has led to the development of the notion of explainable AI (sometimes called XAI) which was initially a loosely defined concept […]

Thanks to the movies and the media, the public understands AI as having grand potential intermixed with enormous complexity. The worst-case scenario is that AI takes over the world and either enslaves or kills off humans. It would be easy to dismiss this somewhat emotional sense of the risk of AI as being based mostly […]

Oh to be a money launderer, a tax evader or frankly any established financial criminal in today’s world. Financial crime is already the most profitable business in the history of the world, but it’s possibly entering a golden age. $6 trillion of panic stimulus is being injected into the financial system over the next few months. In […]

On Jan 22nd, 2020, Singapore launched the second edition of its Model AI Governance Framework at the World Economic Forum in Davos at a joint press conference for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (WEF C4IR). This framework’s “unique contribution to the global discourse on AI ethics lies in translating ethical principles into practical recommendations that organizations […]

The view of customer risk you have today is not reflective of the actual risk they pose to your firm. Bold? maybe, true? absolutely. Historically banks calculate the risk associated with their customers based on what they voluntarily declare when first opening an account: background, employment, location, money sources, counterparties, etc. This is a terrible […]

Last week, we officially launched the new direction of our company, now called Symphony AyasdiAI, and our first AI solution for financial services. Ayasdi AML represents the first packaged solution for banks, and it’s just the beginning.  Ayasdi launched as a general-purpose AI platform with the most advanced machine learning available. Many organizations in healthcare, telecommunications, high-tech manufacturing, […]

  The team at Chartis Research is about as well regarded in financial services as you get. Their flagship report on the RiskTech100 is the bible for the industry and their ability to go deep on the issues AND the technology set them apart. They have recognized Ayasdi consistently. We won their top spot in […]

Of all the industry groups we engage with, ACAMS is different. The mission focus, the educational framework, and the overall community make its events must attend for practitioner and vendor alike. The Las Vegas flagship event dominates the fall calendar and so we were back in sin city again this year – but with an […]

While there is much teeth-gnashing over the hype associated with AI, the fact of the matter is that it is here to stay. While it still needs to grow into its lofty expectations (particularly in the enterprise) there is a growing body of evidence that the small wins are stacking up. One area where AI […]

Deep neural networks are a fascinating and powerful concept that facilitates learning from complex data.  The underlying mathematical construction is that of a directed graph, and there are a number of different architectures (i.e. choices of a directed graph) proposed for various problems.  The default structure is fully connected, where every neuron in a fixed […]

Segmentation is a fundamental component of the anti-money laundering (AML) process, and is concerned with the groupings of entities based on similar business attributes and transactional behavior. Segmentation, when done well, enables AML typologies to focus on unusual behavior for specific groups of entities, using thresholds that allow precise detection of bad actors while minimizing […]

In this post, I want to expand our understanding of the term ‘model’ – the Machine Learning type, not the Derek Zoolander type. The fundamental task in machine learning is to turn data into models and that’s what this post focuses on. The dictionary definition of a model is: “a simplified description, especially a mathematical one, of […]

The Forbes FinTech50 is prestigious list. Assembled by the editorial staff based on their research, stories and conversations, the list is considered one of the most elite in the space – up there with the RiskTech100 from Chartis and a handful of other carefully curated lists. Needless to say, we were delighted to make the […]

Last week, Ayasdi hosted its first ever internal Hackathon. We are a pretty geeky crew over here and we have sponsored our fair share of Meetups, but we have never done a Hackathon – so we were overdue. It seems that we had some pent up demand though – because teams across the company responded […]

This post originally appeared in The Cipher Brief.   When we think of arms races, we are naturally drawn to the physical: missiles, satellites, fighter jets, submarines and aircraft carriers. While those assets are important for conventional warfare, there is an emerging technological arms race in artificial intelligence (AI) that will have profound implications for […]

We are honored to be recognized as the winner of the new Artificial Intelligence category for the 2017 Chartis RiskTech100® report. Chartis is the leading provider of research and analysis for risk technology globally and recognized as the most comprehensive researcher of risk and compliance technology companies. The report states, “The market for AI in […]

We are in an interesting time in the development of artificial intelligence (AI). We’ve moved beyond thinking about AI as just a technology that fuels robotics to understanding what has always been true: AI is a field in and of itself that enables computers to complete tasks that previously would have required human intelligence. With […]