Financial services companies comprise a significant portion of the Attivio client base. In fact, 8 of the world's top 10 banks work with us to address a variety of opportunities in risk and compliance, customer support, and knowledge management. Two events held last week focused on the risk and compliance scenarios and how modern, machine-learning based search can help improve investigator productivity, decrease false positives, and protect the brand. 

We used to think of knowledge workers as a few librarian-like employees responsible for managing all kinds of information. But information has become like currency: the more you have, the more you can do with it. And that means everyone has the potential to leverage information to perform their jobs better and increase the quality – and speed - of their decisions.

Financial services organizations know that failure to effectively monitor trade communications exposes them to a tremendous amount of risk. Whether the risk is driven by the dissemination of sensitive information, inappropriate employee behavior, or a violation of regulatory policies, it’s imperative that firms confidently mitigate these risks so they can protect brand value.This is the reality organizations face and why it’s so important to monitor communications proactively.

Remember the Panama Papers? Those were the 11.5 million leaked documents detailing attorney–client information for more than 214,000 offshore companies associated with Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that specializes in setting up offshore shell companies. Many of these companies were set up to “hide” money so wealthy individuals could evade taxes. Others seemed part of money laundering schemes.

It’s been just about two years since the documents were leaked to journalist Bastian Obermayer from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Since then, as documents continue to be reviewed, a thriving cottage industry has grown up around reporting the suspicions, investigations, allegations, revelations, and prosecutions stemming from the Panama Papers.

Customers often interact with brands across various media and channels. From the customer’s point of view, they’re interacting with a single brand, but inside the company, all that information is often scattered in different databases making it extremely difficult to create a 360 customer view. 

Nowhere is this more important than the financial services industry, where a customer may interact through a series of different channels at any given moment. Then, when they speak with customer service, they expect that the person on the other side of the conversation will have intimate knowledge of their financial dealings. 

An entire ecosystem of tools and data processing frameworks have grown up around Hadoopas companies are building out a modern data architecture. Almost as soon as someone identifies a weakness or limitation—and there have been more than a few—someone else creates a fix. That's one of the reasons the Big Data ecosystem is so complex. And why many large companies hung back before jumping in. They wanted to see if any leaders would emerge from the chaos.

To stay in compliance with rapidly expanding international, federal, and local AML regulations and avoid what can be career- and business-ending consequences, companies face the seemingly Herculean task of investigating every suspicious financial transaction, which can number in the tens of thousands every single month.

Some of these challenges will be addressed at the Association for Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) Conference in Las Vegas later this month.  In his presentation, “Achieving Compliance Efficiencies Amid Heightened Regulatory Scrutiny,” Lee Phillips, Product Manager for Attivio’s Anti-Money Laundering Investigator, will explain how technology can change the investigative process, substantially transforming productivity and ensuring more accurate case resolution.