HAWK:AI at Holland Fintech - how we won pitch of the day
Our CEO, Tobias Schweiger, recently presented at a Holland Fintech meetup for which he won pitch of the day! Below is an overview of the 6-minute pitch, or watch the recording directly on YouTube:
The background for what we do is regulation. Looking at the market we see pressure being applied onto banks and financial institutions to fight financial crime effectively.
We view the current situation as an arms race. More and more is being asked of Financial Institutions (FIs), while criminals find new ways to rapidly respond to existing AML measures. Add regulatory changes driving technology adoption, and you have an industry ripe for change.
That change for us is rooted in the fact that data should be used more intelligently, and technology should finally be applied to the problem because the industry is now ready for it.
The issue in numbers is enormous. $1.6 trillion is laundered annually, $180 billion is spent fighting financial crime, and to no avail. At the end of the day, less than 1% of laundered funds is recovered. The current system isn’t working for banks, payment institutions, or society in general.
Why? All of the tech currently being used is pre-cloud, pre-AI; old-school software stacks that don’t make a difference. They provide alerts or Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) that don’t make sense and end up as false positives more often than not.
Existing tech stacks can’t keep up with regulations, and the attempts to combat the symptoms, rather than the cause, are still mostly limited towards hiring more people. Throwing headcount at the problem, in the thousands, to keep up with regulations. No one has reinvented the wheel and focussed on how to make AML more efficient and effective from a tech perspective.
We’re the tech company reinventing the wheel. We aim to be a central hub as a technology provider that sits between FIs helping everyone in the market identify suspicious behavior faster and more precisely in an effort to proactively take the fight to financial crime.
We work towards detecting and sharing crime patterns using AI, allowing the marketplace to learn from each other because we all have the same goal: ending financial crime. This is an area where we’re clearly stronger together. A key focus needs to be on real-time transaction surveillance. We believe the emergence of payment innovation needs to be in real-time, similar to fraud. We’re seeing that more and more frequently, AML is starting to look like fraud, which is where we believe the industry moving in the coming years.