Blog

Ayasdi’s Next Chapter

BY Ishan Manaktala

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, financial services, and others have seen significant benefits using Ayasdi. 

With the acquisition by SymphonyAI Group, we are taking an evolved approach, namely focusing the next-generation technology on specific use cases and markets ripe for innovation and transformation. Looking at the challenges currently facing the financial services market, the decision on where to start wasn’t tough. 

Today the financial services industry spends over $260 billion globally and over $100 billion in the U.S. on technology. JP Morgan alone will spend over $11 billion in 2019 on technology, an increase of $600 million. Much of that spend is on infrastructure and upgrades to operational systems. But banks like JP Morgan and Bank of America note a significant percentage is going to innovation and disruptive technology. 

That’s where AI comes in. With crimes like money laundering and fraud costing billions annually, banks are looking for better solutions that work with their existing systems. The technology deployed over the past decade is incapable of handling the scale and diversity of data needed to catch bad actors. Ayasdi AML dramatically cuts false positives and reduces investigator workload, so that a bank can focus its efforts on truly suspicious behavior.

AML is just the start. Symphony AyasdiAI solutions for financial services address use cases where AI can add significant value. Already, we’re piloting sanctions screening with several banks to streamline alert dispositioning, and rolling out a production deployment of mortgage fraud prevention. Liquidity optimization is another area where Ayasdi AI is providing value, optimizing the cash on hand a bank needs for treasury functions, and determining optimal cash balances for clients. We also help banks with KYC, performing detailed dynamic analysis of customers to assess behavioral changes.

Of course, financial services is just one industry where Symphony AyasdiAI can deliver value. Symphony AyasdiAI continues to serve customers across a range of industries and applications. And now, the Ayasdi AI technology being used across the SymphonyAI portfolio—in retail, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, and more—to bring unsupervised machine learning to new use cases and solutions. It’s an exciting time to be in AI, and I’m pleased to be a part of the Symphony AyasdiAI team.