OCBC continues with AI adoption via partnership with ThetaRay
The bank aims to fully implement the technology for detecting illegal transactions in the second quarter of next year.
Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. Limited (SGX:O39), or OCBC, has already built itself a reputation of a company actively adopting new fintech solutions. These efforts were underlined today, as the company has unveiled another push into artificial intelligence (AI).
According to today’s report by the Straits Times, OCBC is partnering with ThetaRay, an AI firm with offices in Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore, in order to make its fight against illicit transactions more effective. The bank is extend its proof-of-concept testing with ThetaRay following early tests that showed that the ThetaRay’s technology was able to cut the number of alerts that did not require further review, by 35%.
The accuracy rate of identifying suspicious transactions was also improved thanks to a method of categorising more effectively the flagged transactions by their risk levels. The test was based on one year’s worth of OCBC corporate banking transaction data, with the data anonymised.
The bank aims to fully implement the new technology in the second quarter of next year.
This is not the first time that OCBC taps the capabilities of AI to fight financial crime. In July this year, the bank announced collaborations with fintech companies BlackSwan Technologies and Silent Eight to develop and use a new AI-based solution to detect suspected illegal financing. The product searches for information on individual profiles and maps suspicious transactions to see how they may be linked.
Other banks have also been increasingly turning to AI to help them detect fraud. In October this year, a partnership between Nordic financial services provider Danske Bank A/S (CPH:DANSKE) and Think Big Analytics, the consulting arm of Teradata Corporation (NYSE:TDC), was announced. The companies have collaborated to develop and launch an AI-driven platform for fraud detection. The solution uses machine leaning to analyze tens of thousands of latent features, scoring millions of online banking transactions in real-time to provide actionable insight regarding true, and false, fraudulent activity.