If compliance kills, will AI come to the rescue?

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With every financial crisis, a backlash of regulation ensues. This is especially true for the last financial crisis and the Dodd-Frank Act which followed, considered by many as the most comprehensive financial reform since the Great Depression.

Over 400 new rules were created as part of DFA, including the creation of a new regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

With each wave of regulation, banks’ burden of compliance increases. According to KPMG’s 2016 Regional and Community Banking Industry Outlook Survey, 47 percent of banks estimate the cost of compliance between 11-20 percent of operating costs, a 14 point increase from 2014.

Through small banks have received accommodations in recent major rules, they are consistently exiting the game, mostly through M&A, according to a Congressional Research Service paper on regulation effect on small banks.

screenshot-www.fas.org 2016-08-25 11-22-00 screenshot-www.fas.org 2016-08-25 11-23-21

 

The baking game is getting harder for smaller fish.

Dale Wilson, CEO of First State Bank in San Diego, Texas, explained this vividly in his testimony to the Financial Services Committee on Dodd-Frank. “During the last decade, the regulatory burden for community banks has multiplied tenfold,” he said. “Since the passage of Dodd-Frank there are 80 fewer Texas banks. These banks didn’t fail…. [they] could not maintain profitability with regulatory cost increasing between 50-200 percent.”

In some aspects, regulation costs hit larger banks harder, but they have the resources to sustain it.

Major ongoing regulatory concerns for banks include Anti-Money Laundering investigations, or Know Your Customer rules, which require banks to gather and infer more information about customers, to determine the risk in onboarding new clients. Banks are also subject to regular compliance reporting and periodic stress tests that check their ability to sustain a crisis.

To comply with onboarding regulation, some banks employ a compliance outsourcing company in a low cost location, where an  army of people compare documents in a mostly manual process. In recent years, more financial firms are using artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced rules to automate large portions of this process.

By automating the process, banks can achieve an order of magnitude change in spending, said Michael Henry, general manager for KPMG’s global automated platform business for compliance and regulatory reporting. Streamlining the investigation process with software that uses some form of artificial intelligence increases the productivity of compliance officers by about 65 percent, according to Geri-Lynn Clark of NextAngles. Such software can process a large number of cases, elevating harder ones to humans, thus achieving significant savings in man hours. One client Henry worked with was able to release 300 people after deploying such a platform.

New AI enables software to be more agile and flexible to adapt to the changing regulatory environment, rather than being a specific solution to a specific regulation. KPMG’s Henry envisions the future of compliance activities as a “cold, dark room”, containing just one big computer that can produce any report on demand.

Though it might be too late for some smaller banks that were forced to shut down by the burden of compliance costs, big banks with shrinking margins will certainly benefit from new technology.

Photo credit: Steven-L-Johnson via Visual Hunt / CC BY

Trulioo’s Stephen Ufford: “Missing element to provide financial services for the 2.5 billion unbanked lies in a digital footprint”

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Stephen Ufford is CEO & Founder of Trulioo

What is Truiloo? What was the inspiration/genesis story for why you founded the company?

Stephen Ufford, CEO, Trulioo
Stephen Ufford, CEO, Trulioo

Data has been around for decades, but the industry has drastically evolved in the last 10 years thanks to the Internet. I fell into the industry quickly after moving to the U.S. after high school. As a Canadian living in America, the experience of proving my identity and establishing credit was horrendous and inefficient. I have spent years building a good credit history for myself in Canada, but when I crossed the border and entered into the states, it felt like someone just hit the reset button and my identity was non-existent. I instantly knew this was a huge problem that could easily be fixed and launched iQuiri.com, one of the first companies that made consumer credit reports and scores available online. This was my first foray into the data economy.

Fast-forward 9 years and I’ve successfully launched and exited three data-driven companies with my co-founder, Tanis Jorge. We both decided our next company would have a more meaningful and significant impact on lives around the world. We wanted to go after something profound that would improve quality of life – not just for you and me – but for the man in Chile who doesn’t have access to financial services and wants to start his own business, or the woman in India who works 12-hour days and walks another 2 miles at the end of her day to pay for water. The missing element that could help provide access to financial services for the 2.5 billion unbanked citizens of this world lies in a digital footprint.

Why is identity verification important? What kind of opportunities does doing it at scale open up?

In today’s digital world, trust is the backbone to the success of this truly global phenomenon. What really greases the wheels of today’s fast-growing global economy is trust. As in most online interactions and transactions, anonymity becomes the biggest threat to trust, hence why identity verification is an important element for creating a framework of trust online.

The ability to instantly verify identities around the world will break down the walls that create barriers for cross-border commerce, payments, communication, and consumption. Verified identities helps build the first layer of trust between consumers, merchants, financial institutions – pretty much anyone doing business online.

Has the proliferation of social media made it easier/harder to identify people correctly?

Social media is a double-edge sword. While it offers an abundance of unique data about consumers, there are also ways to create fake accounts. When verifying identities online, it’s best practice to have a layered approach that leverages multiple data sources in combination with advanced machine learning algorithms and fraud prevention tools so that you can weed out the fake accounts before they engage in nefarious online activities.

What’s it like for a Canadian fintech/big data company to compete globally? Are there unique challenges/opportunities?

Globally, Canadian companies have the upper hand in big data thanks to the country’s revolutionary privacy laws and transparency. We have the legal framework, expertise, and know-how needed to be a global leader in the data-driven economy.

Canada is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the growth in the data economy, especially after the recent safe harbour rulings in the European Union.  U.S. companies are now scrambling to find a solution for their data storage needs leaving the door of opportunity wide open for Canadian companies.

Designed to protect both the consumers and the companies that are collecting personally identifiable information (PII), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) was enacted in April of 2000. PIPEDA provides individuals with the right t know why any group collects or discloses their personal data. This level of transparency offers consumers peace of mind when they are looking to invest, buy products from, or associate with Canadian businesses. PIPEDA also ensures that the companies collecting an individual’s data only use the information for a specific purpose with consent from the individual.

Due to the increasing number of data breaches, how PII data is being handled by businesses and government is at top of mind of consumers, policymakers, and regulators. Exporting PII across countries and jurisdictions is a recipe for disaster, increasing risk for data breaches and regulatory compliance issues. Canadian companies are in the best position to enable the enterprise to leverage their global data assets with advanced technologies in a secure, highly regulated environment.

Where is your business headed in 2016? New products/services/geographies?

We are very excited to announce that our global identity verification API or platform, GlobalGateway, now verifies over 4 billion consumers around the world, the largest Know Your Customer (KYC) coverage in the market. Riding on the heels of China, we recently secured unique data sources in India, which will enable our clients to quickly expand into emerging Asian markets that are dominating our global economy with its unprecedented growth.

We are on a mission to provide verified identities for the entire global population, making Trulioo the largest marketplace for global data where businesses and organizations have instant access to consumer information to perform specific checks and activities granted by the user (consumer).

We will continue to disrupt traditional data aggregators around the world with our unique market place model while raising the bar for consumer consent and privacy protection. I believe that Trulioo will play an essential part of developing Canada’s global reputation as a safe haven for digital information into a robust new industry and major contributor to our economy.

Photo credit: charlesdyer / VisualHunt.com / CC BY