$150B human trafficking market, $100B sexual exploitation, 25M forced laborers. Money-laundering estimates indicate that dirty cash accounts for 2%–5% of global GDP per annum. Merlon Intelligence uses AI to stop money flows supporting these activities and identify those involved.
I joined the team as a product designer. Working tightly with product management, developers and machine learning engineers with one mission - prevent the dirty money enter the bank.
The current Anti Money Laundering (AML) methods are non-standardised and often vary from region to region. Anonymity allows criminals to take advantage of that and abuse a bank for financing illegal activities. We wanted to build a tool to empowered analyst at doing screening using AI.
— Product Design
— UX Strategy
— Prototype Validation
— Design System
Understanding the domain and user needs
Interviews with subject matter experts, helped us to understand the risk assessment domain. Our research team gathered experience in a series of meetings and workshops. We triaged underlying user needs with business and turned it into product specification. Since our product is for a specialized audience, we reflected that workflow and glossary in our app.
When I am onboarding a new client, I want to screen the client for risk to check what risk the client presents.
There is plenty of risks analyst need to look for, so we categorized it into risk topics. We used a different color for each category to make navigation in articles easy.
Know your customer better
There are 2 Million articles written every day on the internet. Merlon Intelligence has a built-in AI to propagate and highlight the ones with high relevancy for the investigation. An analyst can fill the knowledge gaps in answering the question: "Who is this person and what risk it present?"
AI and Humans combine forces
We have designed the tool to ease the cognitive load and enhance the decision-making process using AI features. Marrying workflow with machine intelligence has improved risk detection. Analysts working on the investigation will see more articles discussing material risk over time.
...and the Result?
As a result of team effort Merlon Intelligence, we leveraged the most advanced AI and machine learning to support the analysts better, and enable them to be more productive. For one leading global investment bank, we were able to reduce their false positives by 63% Merlon Intelligence has tuned all of our risk topic models to meet the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) guidance. That puts the product at the forefront of the fight against money laundering.