Partnership recognized by International Compliance Association for its collaborative work in AI-driven risk management that reduced false positive alerts by 77% and accelerated the new risk identification hit rate by 10.5%

SymphonyAI, a leader in predictive and generative AI SaaS products for the enterprise, was named “2024 Technology Partner of the Year” at the recent ICA Compliance Awards 2024 Europe for its partnership with South African-based pan-African bank Absa Group Limited to combat financial crime.

SymphonyAI and Absa were selected from among the finalists for using AI to improve transaction monitoring processes, reduce false positives, and discover hidden risk. The ICA Compliance Awards celebrate the outstanding achievements, collaboration, and innovation of compliance and financial crime prevention teams.

The award submission from the two companies highlighted key goals for the project:

• Improve alert quality – reduction of false positive alerts, which would be measured against current alerts, while continuing to identify all known suspicious activity reports (SARs).
• Improve new risk detection – using AI to detect new risks faster than existing transaction monitoring rules.
• Segmentation/transaction monitoring system (TMS) tuning – options for tuning transaction monitoring rules based on SymphonyAI Sensa customer segmentation.

The joint project team used masked data from one country covering two years. The Absa-SymphonyAI project then tested the software’s capabilities further by including data from another country.

Results far exceeded expectations with false positive alerts reduced by 77% while also capturing all suspicious activity reports (SARs) as found by Absa using its current transaction monitoring system.

“The outcomes of the POC in terms of alert reduction were well in excess of the expected thresholds, and as a result, Absa has decided to roll out the SymphonyAI model to three further countries across Africa,” said Absa Managing Executive, Strategic Change for Group Compliance Robert Benvenuti. “This shows the impact and importance that we feel the project has had, and we hope to improve upon our partnership together over the coming years. As regulations increase, risk management has to keep up and we feel that working with SymphonyAI has enabled us to continuously refine our approach to a vital aspect of financial management, improving our commitment to our customers by enhancing our productivity in regard to risk alerts.”

By sampling six months of data, SymphonyAI generated new risk models to improve risk detection. Absa confirmed new risks were identified more quickly versus a slower manual adjustment of rules or manual reporting methods. Alongside this, the new risk identification hit rate of 10.5% was significantly more effective than using rules alone.

“The teamwork between a forward-looking bank like Absa and an enterprise AI innovator like SymphonyAI is creating exciting real-world transformation in pioneering a safer financial services ecosystem,” said Mike Foster, president of SymphonyAI’s financial services division. "We are extremely proud of this recognition with Absa in earning the 2024 ICA Compliance Technology Partner of the Year Award.”

"I’d like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to all the finalists of the ICA Compliance Awards 2024,” said ICA President Pekka Dare. “Your outstanding contributions and unwavering dedication to excellence in the compliance and financial crime prevention industry highlight your professionalism and expertise. It is through your innovative approaches that we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible.”

SymphonyAI’s enterprise SaaS products, which provide unparalleled ability to tackle some of the industry’s toughest scenarios, include enterprise grade AI-based anti-money laundering (AML) transaction monitoring and sanctions screening for dynamic risk assessment, and intelligence-led know your customer and customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening products for dynamic risk assessment; together with powerful AI augmentations for AML and sanctions that enrich existing investments – reducing false positives by up to 80% while continuing to spot 100% of true positives.

The innovative AI-based Sensa Investigation Hub is a complete case management center that acts as a financial crime investigation force multiplier for a unified view and management of enterprise-wide risk and compliance. SymphonyAI’s AI payment fraud prevention significantly reduces fraud losses with real-time fraud detection analytics technology.

About SymphonyAI

SymphonyAI is building the leading enterprise AI SaaS company for digital transformation across the most critical and resilient growth verticals, including retail, consumer packaged goods, finance, manufacturing, media, and IT/enterprise service management. SymphonyAI verticals have many leading enterprises as clients. Since its founding in 2017, SymphonyAI has grown rapidly to 3,000 talented leaders, data scientists, and other professionals. SymphonyAI, 2024 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Business Transformation – AI Innovation, is a SAIGroup company, backed by a $1 billion commitment from successful entrepreneur and philanthropist Dr. Romesh Wadhwani. Learn more at www.symphonyai.com.

About Absa Group Limited

Absa Group Limited (‘Absa Group’) is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and is one of Africa’s largest diversified financial services groups.

Absa Group offers an integrated set of products and services across personal and business banking, corporate and investment banking, wealth and investment management and insurance.

Absa Group owns majority stakes in banks in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania (Absa Bank Tanzania and National Bank of Commerce), Uganda and Zambia and has insurance operations in Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Absa also has offices in China, Namibia, Nigeria and the United States, as well as securities entities in the United Kingdom and the United States, along with technology support colleagues in the Czech Republic.

For further information about Absa Group Limited, visit www.absa.africa.

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