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Benefits of Integrated Surveillance

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Banks need to be on the cutting edge of technology to combat financial crimes. However, the detection of these crimes — such as money laundering and other corrupt activities — is typically handled by a number of different surveillance methods within a firm. Market monitoring to prevent illegal trading, employee monitoring, and monitoring of social media are often handled by different teams who rarely share data or technology. Integrated surveillance seeks to bring all your disparate data sets together, increasing accessibility of data and promoting a proactive rather than reactive strategy to prevent criminal activity.

What is Integrated Surveillance?

Currently, most surveillance systems use tools to review past patterns and evaluate whether a breach has occurred. An integrated surveillance model combines analytics with real-time employee, firm, and customer monitoring to more efficiently identify patterns on both individual and collective levels.

There are many different facets of financial crime prevention including anti-money laundering (AML) operations, know your customer (KYC) services, alert screening, and ID verification, among others. With all these different functions, it’s easy to see why a holistic approach to surveillance in finance can greatly benefit your institution.

Data is Key

Integrated surveillance solutions are proving to be the way of the future for financial institutions all over the world, and there are many clear benefits over the fragmented systems of the past. However, this type of overhaul and harmonization of surveillance has yet to be fully embraced, especially by smaller firms who see the large investment as a deterrent.

Beyond simply providing better risk prevention, establishing a robust infrastructure that can handle many different data sources in a clear and efficient way is key in today’s world. Data is being generated on a larger scale, and what might seem like an unnecessary step today will likely save your organization a lot of trouble in the future. After all, data is only useful if you have a system in place that’s capable of dealing with it in a meaningful manner.

Adopting a scalable, holistic system that can ingest any type of data will give you the edge as the number of formats being generated increases, allowing your firm to expand and grow as technology evolves — something adhering to a rigid schema just wouldn’t be able to do.

Applying AI for Integrated Surveillance

Emerging advancements in artificial intelligence like machine learning can also help automate and optimize these processes. Surveillance in finance needs to be more proactive, and the complex patterns that make up criminal activity can only be properly assessed with an approach that brings all the data together in one place.

For instance, being able to monitor communication and trade data could allow you to catch early warnings of market abuse before it occurs. This might not have been possible had those two data sets been monitored by different teams through different technology with incompatible formats.

Human operators are also liable to miss key details even when using sophisticated software, while AI continues to learn and improve over time. If you’re browsing different vendors for modern surveillance options, looking for certified experts who offer experience with the emerging field of AI is a great way to ensure your institution is on the cutting edge of security.

Integrated Surveillance: An Approach for the Future

Although it can be a difficult task to get right, shifting to a model of integrated surveillance has massive benefits for your firm. The enhanced clarity you gain from being able to view and relate wide varieties of data in real time will help you stop financial crimes before they occur, rather than these surveillance tools being used to investigate after the fact.

The cutting edge of AI makes it more feasible than ever to take in large data sets and actually make use of them while performing global surveillance that a single person or team would be unable to manage. Since trading and financial crime are both global, surveillance needs to be as well if it hopes to keep up.

Automation combined with an integrated approach allows for this to become a reality, better safeguarding your institution by making your threat response more proactive. Not only that, but it will allow you to operate an infrastructure capable of ingesting varying types of data and better adapting to changes, ensuring that your firm will remain trusted and secure into the future.